Alan Davies: Jonathan Creek not defeated by snow

Actor Alan Davies has revealed that the recent snow has put a dampner on filming of the one-off special return of Jonathan Creek, but that they're still aiming for an Easter air date.

Jonathan Creek: Natalie Haynes's guide to TV detectives

The magician-turned-sleuth is a modern-day Victorian gentleman detective - more about solving seemingly impossible puzzles than catching criminals.

Being described as "quite good" has, one suspects, always been a secret ambition of Jonathan Creek. He has been knocking around, on and off, for 13 years now. Thirteen years, you say? Really? Wow. If natural selection exists within television, then switching on to discover Alan Davies is still pottering around solving murder mysteries in a duffel coat is like finding some chubby, blind flightless bird on an island that is populated by hungry tigerraptor hybrids with lasers for eyes. It just shouldn't be there. It shouldn't stand a chance against the evolved predators of slick, intelligent, compelling, boxed-set-friendly television we're all addicted to now. Thirteen years of some swollen tongued Nick Hornby offcut solving mysteries via his understanding of stage magic? It just doesn't make sense. It's one for the Creationists.

Anyway, this 90-minute episode, The Judas Tree, lurched along as if the plot had been cooked up via a game of consequences. The lift in which the story was pitched must have been stuck between floors as Mr Jonathan Creek Man tapped his boss on the shoulder, took a gigantic breath and blurted: "OK, a nubile but haunted housemaid gets a job working for a successful murder-mystery writer in a house that witnessed the unexplained and still unsolved death of a Victorian doctor who jilted his own lover-slash-housemaid who was Egyptian and may have been a sorceress and is now somehow haunting the new housemaid who ends up charged with a murder." That's the opening, anyway. It goes on. At one point, someone bleeds what looks like runny Marmite for no apparent reason. It's that kind of show.

It's not that it wasn't occasionally fun; it was just mostly nonsense. OK, Doctor Who is nonsense, but it's supposed to be. But this was nonsense by accident, which isn't as good. If there was an adjective somewhere between "camp" and "crap", this episode would be that, in the way that anything featuring a death scene with someone pointing a finger and screaming "She did it! She murdered me!" sort of has to be.

Times are clearly hard at the BBC. Alan Davies says an important scene in Sunday night's Easter special of Jonathan Creek took place in darkness, "because they couldn't afford to decorate the set - the budget didn't stretch to providing all the props and furniture necessary for it".

Curly-haired Al has already been ordered to take a pay cut to continue playing Creek. "I resisted but it was that or put 75 crew out of work," he says.

And difference was the secret of a wonderful weekend of popular drama on BBC One. Jonathan Creek remains indefinably cross-genre. It is a mystery series without detectives, an X-Files saga for sceptics. It is a comedy that can scare you rigid. At its centre is a romance that never happens. I don't know how long it takes David Renwick to devise his meticulous Creek plots but in last night's not a line was wasted. Even the ones apparently there just to be funny had hidden purpose. "They think there might be an early malignancy knocking about there somewhere," said Ian McNeice's hypochondriac priest of his ample body. But he really was ill - although he performed a little resurrection from the pulpit at the end.

The episode was called The Judas Tree and its plot would not have worked without its Bible references or its Roman Catholic dramatis personae. Yet only a very solemn Christian would object to its showing on Easter Day. In any case, from the moment of Creek's first party trick - divining from his maligned sidekick Joey's appearance exactly what she had been doing that day - this was, more than anything, a Sherlock Holmes story.

Alan Davies criticises Jonathan Creek scheduling

Alan Davies has criticised the scheduling of Jonathan Creek over the Easter weekend.

The Judas Tree was one of David Renwick's convoluted, gothic puzzles, shot through with comedy. There was, for instance, something really nasty in the woodshed. The murderer, who was also a detective writer, spelled out the dark art of bamboozlement: "The trick is to fool the reader into trusting all the wrong people, and then - in the most innocent and everyday details - sow the seeds of terror." Agatha Christie, however, once said that the best murder was simply to push someone down the stairs. Watch out for the white Persian cat, which at one point is quite obviously thrown on to a table by the cat wrangler, and bitterly resents it.

In the months since Jonathan Creek was last on our screens, writer David Renwick seems to have spent a lot of time with the Sherlock Holmes casebook. Guest Paul McGann remarks on the "lingering air of Victorian mystery" and he's not kidding. From spooky stories about people succumbing at precisely predicted times of death to Jonathan discerning sidekick Joey Ross's (Sheridan Smith) current occupation from the redness of her fi ngertips, this one-off special has the defi nite feel of a Baker Street consulting room about it. Not that this makes it any less enjoyable. Indeed, all the hoodwinking and sleight of hand will keep you on your toes right up to the big reveal. Alan Davies remains extremely likeable as the duffel-coated sleuth, his delivery of those twisted lengths of explanatory detail being so good that he even gets the opportunity to do it twice over. The only flabbiness in the plot comes from the appearance of Adam Klaus: Stuart Milligan brings a wolfish smoothness to the part of the high-profile magician, but his subplot goes nowhere and detracts from an otherwise well-burnished brainteaser of an episode.