Jonathan Creek

From Exampleproblems

Jonathan Creek is a mystery television series produced by the BBC and written by David Renwick. The series is primarily a crime drama, but features strong comic characters and usually features comic subplots. Somewhat anomalously, it is produced by the BBC's in-house Entertainment department rather than the Drama department. The first series was produced by Susan Belbin; all subsequent episodes have been produced by Verity Lambert.

The series follows the exploits of Jonathan Creek (Alan Davies), a designer of illusions for a stage magician (inspired partly on Ali Bongo), and Maddie Magellan (Caroline Quentin), a pushy journalist, as they work together to solve baffling crimes where others have failed to do so. Jonathan Creek contributes his superb lateral brain, and Maddie Magellan is a plausible liar who never seems to have trouble sneaking in to closed crime scenes. The programme usually features 'impossible crimes', for example a mysterious crime having been committed in a sealed environment from which no earthly criminal could have escaped. This type of story is usually called a locked room mystery. The stage magician Adam Klaus, played by Anthony Stewart Head in the pilot and Stuart Milligan from the second series, is portrayed as a rather amoral and ambitious man, played for humorous effect, whose magic tricks often go wrong.

The series started in 1997; To date (July, 2005) there have been four series (although there was nearly a year's gap in the middle of the fourth series, which might lead some to argue there are actually five series, with the last two being very short). For the 2001 Christmas special and thereafter, Caroline Quentin declined to appear, and so a second supporting role was introduced: theatrical agent Carla Borrego, played by Julia Sawalha. After her first appearance, the character married TV producer Brendan Baxter, played by Adrian Edmondson, and she became a TV presenter.

Part of the humour comes from the fact that Jonathan often doesn't want to get involved in other people's problems, and has to be pressured into it by Maddie or Carla. In one episode, involving a theft from a critic who had lambasted Adam's act, he took great delight in announcing he had solved the crime in five minutes, but wasn't going to tell anybody.