Jonathan Creek The Grinning Man – Not Scifi but I love it

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Jonathan Creek The Grinning Man DVD Cover
Jonathan Creek The Grinning Man DVD Cover

Alan Davies’ Jonathan Creek is one of those magical programs that is not science fiction but is just left of a mainstream crime drama, but dropping to the level of the (vastly underated Crime Traveler).
David Renwick’s fantastic creation of the crime solving illusion creator for the almost bumbling David Copperfield wannabe magician Adam Klause (played by Tony Head in the pilot and Stuart Milligan from then on.

The show ran for 4 years upto 2001 and was then rested (and missed) thanks to Jonathan Creek appearing on DVD I managed to catch up with the few episodes I had missed.

Resurected last year for a Christmas special “Jonathan Creek, The Grinning Man” and this time moving on from the supporting ladies of Maddy (Caroline Quentin) and “The Other One” (Julia Sawalha) an on to Big Finish Doctor Who companion Sheridan Smith. Firstky I have to say that Maddy was the best companion to Jonathan Creek (except for possibly the near equal detective played by Rick Mayall on the old Christmas Special The Black Canary).

The 2008 Jonathan Creek special The Grinning Man starts its story at midnnight on Midsummer’s Day 1938, as a famous Harvard geneticist, Eli Mencken, accepts a challenge to spend the night inside a gloomy old attic room… where the ghost of a madman is said to prey upon human flesh. Next morning, he has impossibly vanished from the hermetically sealed chamber. The only clue to his disappearance is traces of grisly ectoplasm on the bed.

Seventy years on, the vast Gothic house known as Metropolis has passed into the hands of the original owner’s daughter and her son, but the strange, unexplained events in “The Nightmare Room” continue…

When two young women take shelter there one night from a raging thunderstorm, it is not long before the ominius “presence” has claimed another victim.

Determined to get to the truth about what has happened to her friend, the fearlessly sceptical Joey Ross finds herself working alongside veteran lateral thinker Jonathan Creek, as together they embark on a complex, often dangerous, investigation into a mystery which only continues to deepen…

Jonathan Creek: The Grinning Man is available on DVD from the 19th October 2009 and yes Jonathan Creek will return (even though actor Alan Davies has had a pay cut) at Easter 2010

You can compare prices of the Jonathan Creek The Grinning Man DVD (out 19th October) to the right.

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