Daily Telegraph, 6 May 1997, by James Delingpole
"And for my next trick... The man who invented Victor 
Meldrew talks to James Delingpole about his latest 
television creation - a crime-solving magician's assistant"
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'I WAS reading this newspaper survey the other day of the 10 
things people find most annoying. And I was furious that it 
didn't mention litter and aggressive drivers..." In a 
Buckinghamshire hamlet about 10-minutes' drive - if you put 
your foot down - from Luton, scriptwriter David Renwick is 
rehearsing a few of his pet hates. "Litter bothers me a hell 
of a lot," he fumes. "It's emblematic of the dehumanisation 
of our population. I couldn't drop a crisp packet if my life 
depended on it." And so it goes on. "Tailgaters, that's 
another thing. People who drive two inches away from your 
back bumper...basically careless...absolute lunatics..." 
Close your eyes and you could almost be listening to Victor 
Meldrew, the irascible anti-hero of BBC1's *One Foot in the 
Grave*. Which isn't so surprising, for it was Renwick who 
invented him. "Victor's attitudes are my attitudes," says 
Renwick, who views his creation as a "messianic figure 
single-handedly shouldering all the ills of society". But 
there the similarity ends. Not only is Renwick more laid-
back and milder of manner than the seething pensioner, but, 
a youthful 45, he has the sort of student-casual dress sense 
(brown and green plaid shirt, light brown jeans, battered 
deck shoes, day-old stubble) that would surely drive 
buttoned-up Victor into fits of apoplexy. Enter, then, a new 
fictive creation who embodies the other half of Renwick's 
divided personality: a dishevelled, self-effacing magician's 
assistant called Jonathan Creek, whose crime-solving 
adventures begin on BBC1 on Saturday. Though the series - 
titled *Jonathan Creek* - has its funny moments, it's closer 
in spirit to *Columbo* than *One Foot in the Grave*. It will 
feature violent death, inspired detective work and a 
plethora of magic tricks so bizarre that you'll want to 
gasp, "I don't believe it!" Having written several episodes 
of *Agatha Christie's Poirot*, he fancied another crack at a 
crime series. Not a "gritty social document" about "murders 
on council estates", but something in the "old-fashioned 
tradition" of Sherlock Holmes, where the sleuth's deductive 
powers are paramount, and where you're less interested in 
whodunit than how-they-dunit. In this, to judge by the 
opening episode, Renwick has succeeded remarkably well. 
Despite having done next to no research ("If you're not 
careful, you get bogged down in too much referential 
realism"), he has devised for his murderer a modus operandi 
so fiendishly complex that you'd imagine Renwick had spent a 
lifetime in the conjuring trade. The darker moments are 
leavened by characteristic wit. And in Creek (long-haired 
comedian Alan Davies) and his well-upholstered, acid-tongued 
sidekick Maddy Magellan (a part tailored for Caroline 
Quentin) the series has what promises to be an enduring 
comic double-act. (Better still is Nescafe-ad smoothie 
Anthony Head as Creek's egotistical magician boss.) Jonathan 
Creek will run for at least two series, though it's not as 
if its creator needs either the scheduling space or the 
money. Such is *One Foot*'s popularity that some episodes 
have been repeated as many as three times, and, thanks to 
foreign sales, repeat fees and a lucrative American spin-off 
starring Bill Cosby, Renwick has earned more than enough for 
his simple needs. His home isn't grand; he and his wife 
Ellie (whom he married three years ago) have no children; 
and, so far, his only concessions to excess are an annual 
holiday in America and his recently purchased 7-series BMW. 
Has he never been tempted to buy a swimming-pool for his 
garden? "I can't swim. Nor can Ellie." It hasn't always been 
so easy. Born into a working-class Luton family, Renwick 
spent his first four years after school working for a local 
newspaper. Having discovered that the job largely seemed to 
entail ringing up mothers to find out how they felt after 
their babies had been run over, he quit to pursue a full-
time writing career. For 14 years he collaborated with 
Andrew (*2point4 Children*) Marshall on series including 
*Hot Metal* and *End of Part One*, a sketch show similar in 
flavour to *Not the Nine O'Clock News*. But, until the age 
of 37, Renwick's biggest claim to fame was as chief purveyor 
of monologues for Ronnie Corbett on *The Two Ronnies*. Then 
came *One Foot in the Grave*, which, it turns out, was 
"never meant to be about old age and old people. It was just 
a convenient premise for a character who had a lot of time 
on his hands. It could just as easily have been about a 30-
year-old who'd been made redundant." The reason Meldrew is a 
pensioner is that Renwick wrote the role for Richard Wilson, 
whom he first glimpsed on the set of *Whoops Apocalypse* 
(another of Renwick's collaborations with Marshall). 
Renwick's earliest inspiration was John Cleese, to whom, 
while still at school, he had submitted several script ideas 
for the Monty Python team. "Instead of the usual rejection 
slip, I had a nice letter back saying it showed promise, but 
that though I wrote good dialogue what was weaker were the 
ideas behind them." From this Renwick learned what he still 
believes is the most important rule of comedy writing: the 
idea is all. "People tend to concentrate very heavily on 
words, but really that's just dressing. To me the benchmark 
of a good comedy is if you can describe the plot to someone 
the next day and it's still funny." This is what separates 
classics like *Fawlty Towers* from the herd. "Some of the 
funniest sequences aren't to do with well-turned phrases or 
acerbic remarks by Basil, but with what's going on." If 
there is a secret to Renwick's own success, he reckons it's 
that he spends more time thinking than writing. "When *One 
Foot* started picking up big audiences, everyone wanted to 
find a reason for it. And they hit upon this theory that 
Victor Meldrew was an icon, a spokesman for our age. "But 
I'm afraid it's much simpler than that. Each episode, we 
tried as hard as we could to make it as funny as it could 
possibly be. If it wasn't funny people wouldn't have 
watched."



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