Renwick confirms return of Jonathan Creek

Alan Davies is set to reprise his role as magician sleuth Jonathan Creek for a second feature-length special for Easter next year, writer David Renwick has confirmed.

The Judas Tree was initially slated to air next Christmas, but the writer said that budget issues had pushed the project back.

After a five-year absence, Jonathan Creek returned with a two-hour special, The Grinning Man. Vanishing guests in a haunted attic was the theme, with Alan Davies joined by Sheridan Smith as his latest sleuthing sidekick.

As an audience participation puzzle it couldn't be faulted. I spent the final 30 minutes hurling increasingly desperate and ultimately incorrect speculations at the screen - It's a false knife!, It's a false corpse!, The magician is the reincarnation of his grandfather! etc - but never came close to unravelling any of the several mysteries contained in David Renwick's script.

But for all its ingenuity, Renwick's work just couldn't support its excessively indulgent running time, with the drama beginning to sag long before the murderer was revealed.

The Times Review

Our hero was brainy and cranky and the show itself awkward, funny and idiosyncratic (as you'd expect from the creator, writer and director David Renwick). If you were looking out for it, there was even an attempt at profundity: something about having to choose between the present and posterity.

David Renwick resurrects his sleuth

It's been five years since the illusionist-detective Jonathan Creek vanished from our screens. So what, you may wonder, has caused him to rise from his box now.

Another David Renwick Interview

The Off The Telly website interviews the writer of the show about the new 2008 Christmas special.

David Renwick Interview

M.E.N. interviews the Jonathan Cree writer about the new special.

I desperately want to love The IT Crowd. It has moments of genuine sparkle and surreal invention (as it should, coming from one half of Father Ted's creators), but it generally leaves me frustrated and disappointed.

The set-ups are just so forced and graceless that you start to mentally accumulate them yourself, just to see most resolved awkwardly in the last five minutes. David Renwick is a master of this style of writing (see any episode of One Foot In The Grave), but Graham Linehan is not. It's almost like the clunkiness is meant to be part of the fun and charm, but it's just annyoing.

The laughter from the live audience is another reason The IT Crowd can grate with me. When the studio audience are practically wetting themselves at every joke, it only causes mild confusion at home that we're not laughing as much.

David Renwick came close to perfection in his bittersweet bouillabaisse, by turns hilarious, poignant and bleak. This first and more satisfying series from 2005 introduced lovable anxious Alice (Tamsin Greig) and the man she is surely destined to meet... A true original, in the best possible way.

The Independent Review

David Renwick has been attempting to farm the thin soil of romantic disillusionment in Love Soup, a series that admirably denies itself a lot of facile satisfactions but that still, nine episodes in, seems not to have found a confident rhythm.

In an hour, they packed in Ruby Wax's RSC reminiscences (she couldn't master the wench accent), a tribute to Richard Beckinsale, Neil Innes on Rutland Weekend TV (surely worth a repeat), a little bit about the over-rated Adrian Mole, Alan Carr's guide to Northampton, David Baddiel going back to school, Mel and Sue in Oxford, David Renwick's life on the Luton News and the evolution of Spitting Image. Great value for money!