Jonathan Creek – Daemons’ Roost [DVD] [2017]

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Since its first appearance in 1997, Jonathan Creek has been something of a source of wonder to me — long before I even recognised the impossible crime in fiction as a subgenre of thing that had ever existed, this show provided frankly wonderful plots of seeming undoable things who workings and execution were fully demystified within an hour. Unfortunately this proves to be one of this episode’s weaker points – the killer (not seen in that original episode; he murdered via poisoned self-addressed envelopes) comes back to hunt down Creek in a strange act of revenge after his prison release. Well, the latest adventure found Creek in Daemons' Roost, the home of Ken Bones’ Nathan Clore, legendary horror director with a dark past.

Creek seems out of place and uncomfortable in his role as husband to a wealthy, upwardly mobile woman, who seems to have all the character of a boiled egg and serves simply to antagonise, thwart, and put down her husband's former lifestyle. Although still incredibly frustrating, it does at least allow Sarah Alexander’s character – whilst still unnecessarily meddling, determined that Creek avoid any case-solving – to be far less cynical and slightly expanded from the one-dimensional character of previous instalments. His old fellow investigator, Joey Ross, draws him into a complex case involving a secret society, seemingly supernatural events at a girls’ boarding school, and the miraculous disappearance of a body in front of three witnesses made all the more baffling with photographic evidence that the body was definitely there. With an unnecessary subplot and too much waffle before Creek reaches the main location of the mystery and some terrible comic set pieces – Polly’s mistaken vodka ice cube ‘drunken’ scene being a new low for her character – there’s easily half an hour that could’ve been shaken out. This episode contains so many brilliant things – ominously creepy horror, distinctive characters, Holmesian deductions and quirky comedy.These elements do a lot to remind us about the show’s history and make this feel like an intentional effort to pay homage to the show’s past. A drug dealer and criminal who was shot six times in the head somehow managed to climb up the stairs from the cellar in the intervening time between his body being dumped and it being discovered months later. The impossibilities — poisoning and flying-to-their-deathness — are to be commended for their essential simplicity, but there’s still so much about this that I don’t like.

A welcome addition to the Creek canon, with top drawer support from the always entertaining Warwick Davis. Daemons’ Roost is certainly not the tidiest or most compact episode of Jonathan Creek ever made but I think it is broadly successful nonetheless in marrying the elements of the show’s past and then-present to deliver an intriguing and entertaining ninety minutes of television.I’d originally planned to watch the first few minutes of “Daemon’s Roost” just to see whether the show was anything like what I imagined it would be like, but I ended up watching the whole thing. However, a reliable, independent witness insists she spoke to the unharmed woman several hours later as she went to church. Alison, the only daughter left, now grown up, is summoned to Daemon’s Roost to learn the truth about what happened to the rest of her family. Antonia, a friend of Maddy's, asks her and Jonathan to discover what her husband, Norman, has been up to after reliable independent witnesses place him on both sides of the Atlantic only minutes apart. After an awkward break-up some months ago, Jonathan and Carla – now married to the producer of a Crimewatch-like television show – unite to investigate a serial killer who wears a Davy Crockett hat and kills people named after flowers.

Stephen says, once they’re outside the front door and Alison is having a terrifying flashback to her childhood. Pictured: Happier days… As the series wore on the impossibilities became slightly more abtruse — series four’s ‘The Tailor’s Dummy’ is probably about a man changing race on the spot, but also about a man jumping out of a window; ‘The Chequered Box’ has a weird impossibility which could be resolved in about four seconds but isn’t really an impossibility from the key character’s perspective; and whatever the hell ‘Gorgon’s Wood’ is about I honestly don’t know. This is four hours and twenty minutes in to the project, which leaves me imagining an excruciating future in which this half-hour programme is extended into a real-time seven hour, forty two minute slow TV tool porn extravaganza.When Harriet is seen falling from a window, Emily is arrested on suspicion of murder, though she swears she is innocent. If this is to be the final episode of Jonathan Creek, it is a good one that sends the show off with style. Alan Davies, now doing a perfect impression of Alastair McGowan doing an impression of Alan Davies, remains the master of starting to talk only then to stop mid sentence and go ‘of course’. Certainly the TV guide synopsis sounds like it’s going to be a bloody thrill every minute, minus the boobs, with talk of ‘sinister twists’, ‘gruesome rituals…frighteningly revived’, and ‘horrifying consequences’.

Also on the scene are Mr Ryman ( Jason Barnett), a security camera installer; Phillipa Teller ( Rosalind March), carer for the proprietor; and the proprietor himself, filmmaker Nathan Clore ( Ken Bones). I feel like I’ve been very grouchy about this where everyone else has sort of quite enjoyed it with a few hesitations. A seemingly satanic powered individual, complete with hidden chamber, Surtees has the ability to apparently levitate his victims across the room (no strings attached) sending them from a cage and through the air into a fiery furnace. Following a series of strange events at the mansion and a near-miss with the criminal, Johnathan and Polly end up retreating to the mansion to investigate…. Jonathan, Polly and the vicar go to all of the trouble to set up a meeting with the culprit in a fancy restaurant.In James May: The Christmas Reassembler (BBC4) there are at least as many elements, but the effect of piecing them together is considerably less entertaining. The striped unicorn subplot was almost as interesting as the main story itself, although anyone with a knowledge of chemistry will spot the culprit easily, as I did.