Evening Standard, 12 May 1997, by Matthew Norman
"Case of lost paddle"
-----------------------------------------------------------

IT is a poignant fact of life that profoundly humourless 
people - the kind of people who, like the entire French 
nation, require rib bandages at the first sign of Jerry 
Lewis - invariably feel pressurised into developing a sense 
of humour. Who will easily forget, during the last Tory 
leadership election, the ear-shattering silence that greeted 
John Redwood's press conference quip that, having looked 
into the future, he could reveal that the winner would be 
someone called John? 

When unfunny people try to be funny, it may not be pretty 
but at least it's comprehensible. What is harder to 
understand is why funny people ever feel tempted to put 
their energy into being unfunny? Why, for example, would as 
talented a comic as Alan Davies wish to be a straight actor 
in as mirthless a show as *Jonathan Creek* (BBC1)? Why would 
the splendid Caroline Quentin want to join him there? And 
why, above all, would the great David Renwick, author of 
*One Foot In The Grave*, want to write it? 

If there is one thing British television needs less than 
another food show starring Loyd Grossman, it is another 
determinedly off-beat, attemptedly winsome crime drama 
series . . . so here it is. Quentin plays Maddy, a writer 
who corrects miscarriages of justice but who cannot correct 
her own wretched private life, and Davies is the faintly 
depressive, duffel-coated hypernerd with a genius for 
designing stage illusions and no private life at all. 

After as languid an opening as you are ever likely to see 
outside a government research centre into acute insomnia, 
the two meet by chance and having formed the inevitable 
unlikely alliance they set off to solve the case of an 
amorous painter shot dead in his home. 

What ingenuity ensued came not from the contrived attempts 
to imbue *Jonathan Creek* with the obligatory sprinkling of 
eccentricity - a semi-autistic gift for mental arithmetic, 
in this case, and a windmill home combining to substitute 
for anything that might be called characterisation - but 
from the ambitious attempt to meld the worlds of murder and 
stage illusion, Creek using the dazzlingly idiosyncratic 
mental processes required to create the latter to unravel 
the mechanics of the former. 

Unravel it, after a sequence of red herrings too blatant to 
mislead the most credulous viewer, he does, the murderess 
proving not to be the artist's hatchet-faced, magazine-
editing wife, or his cleaning lady lover Katrina, but 
Francesca, a blonde model with a talent for shooting 
straight with her toes and, bafflingly for a woman referred 
to as French, a Dutch accent reminiscent of Ruud Gullit's, 
but with no discernible motive. 

If the plot was too Byzantine to hold the interest, the 
denouement almost nonsensical, and Renwick's script 
surprisingly laboured ('It's called a Steady-cam, it's 
supposed to elminate jerks,' says Maddy. 'So's Clint 
Eastwood,' says Creek, posing as TV cameraman, 'but I 
wouldn't want him strapped to my chest all afternoon'), a 
still more serious weakness was the show's apparent 
confusion about the tone it wished to strike. 

Sometimes attempting to be drolly ironic, at others 
intriguing, at others still winsome and sometimes touching, 
it did not know, to lapse into technical TV critic argot for 
a moment, whether it was Arthur or Martha. 

Meanwhile, despite some nice cameos, notably from Anthony 
Head as the illusionist, the central characters looked 
horribly mismatched; if the makers were hoping for some will 
they/won't they? sexual tension - and this scene-setting 
episode concluded with Creek's hopes of rumpy raised and 
then dashed - they would have done better to dig up Arthur 
Mullard and Queenie Watts. 

Caroline Quentin's background, and first love, is stage 
musicals, and the kind of expansiveness that dominates a 
theatre translates, on television, into overacting. As for 
Davies, perhaps taking too literally some advice based on 
the old screen clich that 'less is more', he appears not to 
act at all. 

There is something highly endearing about Alan Davies, a 
curious cross-breed with the hair of a King Charles and the 
eyes of a Basset hound, but gormless does not do him 
justice. It is as if, having had a gormectomy, he was then 
subjected to both chemotherapy and radiation, lest there be 
one stray cell of gorm left. For a comic, that may well be a 
useful tool, but for a leading actor expected to carry a 
drama series, a luminescent lack of energy is lethal.



-----------------------------------------------------------
                     Bentley's Bedlam
            http://www.BetsyDa.com/bedlam.html

This website is for information and entertainment purposes only 
and is not intended to infringe on copyrights held by others.