Jonathan Creek: The Clue of the Savant's Thumb [Review]

Jonathan Creek: The Clue of the Savant's Thumb
BBC One, Monday 1^st April 2013

Weirdly this was only the third episode of ‘Jonathan Creek’ I have seen. As it mixes up the supernatural with mystery solving, and is written by one of my favourite writers David “One Foot In The Grave” Renwick, I’m not sure why I never followed it from the start. But, here I am, trying to catch up.

‘The Clue of the Savant’s Thumb’ comes three years after the last episode and much has changed: Creek is now married, no longer living in a windmill, and working in creative advertising. But it’s not long before a mystery involving mysterious circles appearing on the heads of young girls in a Catholic school from many years ago and the death and disappearance of a corpse from a room entice him back into business in this 90-minute special.

And what a weird special it was. Renwick certainly brought his love of the surreal and of black comedy to proceedings. It was a slow start after the initial mystery was set up with Creek himself not appearing for a while, but he was supported by an on-form Sheridan Smith as his sidekick and an unusual, occasionally stilted and rather out-of-place, but no less engaging Rik Mayall as a wheelchair-bound friend-cum-rival who helps on the case.

As with any of the shows, the mysteries are well set-up and solved and everything that initially appears supernatural has a firmly rational explanation, though the episode did feel a little disjointed in that the past mystery and contemporary events were pretty much unrelated aside from the presence of one character as a girl and then a woman. ‘The Clue of the Savant’s Thumb’ did feel like two episodes shoehorned into one, or a one-hour episode cruelly extended into ninety minutes. The ending, though making sense mostly, felt tacked on but actually quite funny, with Mayall channelling his Blackadder Flashheart character in many ways, bursting in to save the day.

But whilst the central mysteries were solid with several strong ‘Ah! So that’s how!’ moments thanks to mobile phones, hidden windows and revolving globes, the episode did throw up some mysteries of its own: how did Mayall’s wheelchair-bound character get up to the top floor of the old building? How could you mistake apple juice for petrol? What was the reason for introducing a character undergoing a sex-change at risk of raising the ire of the transgender community when it has no relation to the plot?

And there were a few good visual jokes as well, such as the book name-checking Fox News on a shelf, but it also suffered from an anonymous writing credit to Richard Dawkins, with a fair chunk of the plot exalting atheism  as much as it did other religions.

These slight plot holes aside, the episode was well filmed and the plot rolled out, with some great cinematography and funny, surreal, perhaps a little unrealistic characters. It did suffer from excessive characters in the episode and a feeling of slowness at the start and bloatedness at the end but was still a thoroughly enjoyable episode, especially due to the performances of Smith, Lumley and Mayall.

(6/10)