After a chance meeting at one of magician Adam Klaus's shows, Maddy recruits the initially reluctant Jonathan Creek, the actual designer of Adam's tricks, to provide her with some ideas about how the wife could have reached the scene of the crime, but Creek soon uncovers an even more sinister side to the case. It was an elaborate plot, and extremely silly, with little sense of plausibility and all rather reminiscent of Scooby Doo. By the time Danse Macabre’s finished playing it looks like it’s going to go hard on the horror and the grand guignol. One more false step and it would probably be time to hang up the duffle coat for Creek and the series.

The stepfather dies, for no reason, and it turns out he didn’t need to be there at all for the plot to happen.A former glamour model, now living quietly with her rich, older husband in the countryside, is seriously injured when her garden shed explodes, leaving her badly burned. It’s a jarring but thrilling teaser that grabs the attention and sets the tone for the next ninety minutes; the only shame is that the script doesn’t lean more heavily into the Hammer parody tone. Five series and six specials of the British mystery crime drama series Jonathan Creek have been broadcast since its debut in 1997.

So we get treated to more time with Jonathan throwing away all his stuff from the windmill — y’know, the mementos of the magic career that formed the first 30-odd years of his life — and reminiscing about a dead brother we’ve never heard of before. 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. Details about Jonathan’s early life have been fairly scant over the series and the sudden decision to flesh out his backstory and explore his memories could easily have been taken further had other stories followed. An artist is found dead at his home, while his mistress is found bound, blindfolded and gagged with tape.Objects like the thrice stolen 90’s answer phone tape in The Problem at Gallows Gate (1998), the clunky PC monitors of episodes like The House of Monkeys (1997) and the sharp glass shelf and modern book titles of the ‘Striped Unicorn Affair’ embed the mysteries in the moment, making them ‘of the time’. A pop star's husband is baffled as to how a woman he had an affair with can regrow a full head of hair barely two days after she had it all hacked off in a hoax kidnap ransom video.