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CHRISTMAS SPECIALS
Jonathan Creek: "Black Canary"
Thursday 24/12/98, BBC1
by Matthew Bullen
December 2000
 

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Here is a nation of pens and pencils. They have arms and legs, and they are thronging the sides of a street for their champion who is David Renwick, captioned "A Strong Writer" in the manner of a dinner plate captioned "Good Husbandry" in a Victorian political cartoon. When the pens and pencils go home and hang their scarves over the banister they will tell their ballpoint children that there is many a slip 'twixt nib and screen and that Renwick appears to know this, to remember this, and to do his best to ensure that it does not happen with his work.

Jonathan Creek is a rare crime series, because all of its episodes have been written by one man. Even programmes acutely aware of their own winning formula - Taggart or Morse, for example - have tended to use a pool of writers, albeit a small one. Renwick, though, seems keen to keep Creek close and in measured doses. My thought is that he might be nervous of it being turned into a Sunday 7pm show, of it being scheduled for double-figure episodes at a time. The series' light-entertainment strand may have added another angle to any leeriness. Without a strong hand, it might have its "comedy drama" label interpreted such that it would become a post-scone favourite son, the Jonathan-Maddie relationship stretched to a wha-wha-wha-whaaa romance and the possibilities of its impossibilities given too much of an action-comic scowl.

Certainly, the episodes we have are not only all-Renwick but also few. There have been only 18 stories and under 20 hours of air-time in three years. For viewers, any vague air of rationing like this - albeit the result of a creative process and not post-war poverty - lights up with a soft one-bar glow when held near to the institution of the BBC. And it is what gave a resonance to the designation of "Black Canary", the 1998 seasonal one-off, as a Christmas special.

It felt like a Christmas special to me, and I saw it on tape in early Spring. There was a considerable gap between the end of the second series and "Black Canary", so it catered for a viewers' appetite. A third series was not due to appear for many months (it came almost a year later) so there was perhaps a correlating flavour of sweet sorrow after the 90 minutes were complete.

The introduction of the hero into the episode is very well-judged. Ignoring any temptation to make it a knockabout pass-the-gift-wrap bicker between Jonathan and Maddie, it takes care to place a half-glimpsed Creek outside a snowy tube-station staircase. Again there is a feeling of the special, of an involving distance between audience and main man. In fact, snow is central to the story. Someone dies on a crisp white lawn in front of a witness and then - in a nice knot that adds to the sense of drift-locked paradox - is proved to have been dead for hours already.

Rik Mayall as Inspector Gideon Pryke, who becomes Jonathan's intellectual pace-mate for the episode, is restrained and clipped. Once more, "Black Canary" sticks to its iced manor-house maze and does not become a frizzed Bottom-esque party cracker. Even the comedy scenes feel close and cold. Jonathan is called angrily on his decision to wind up his window when a hulk approaches the car he is sitting in, and it feels right that the scene is hemmed into a passenger seat with its head stuck up next to the chilly glass.

Renwick threads "Black Canary" with strands that contain features of anxiety and melancholy which are enhanced by the delays and isolation implied by snow. Adam Klaus is going into surgery. Jonathan meets an old love, their past together seeming a bit queasy and unresolved. A man in a trance is seen having bloody flesh pulled vividly from his body.

"Black Canary" makes a number of complimentary half-references to John Dickson Carr, the prolific locked-room author. Renwick gives Pryke the first name Gideon as a nod to Carr's Dr Gideon Fell. The country-house setting of "Black Canary", and its mix of mysterious medicine, magic, old-school guns and nooses, is a world in which Carr would have felt at home.

Renwick and the rest of the team behind "Black Canary" understood very well that television viewers now regard the medium as an attraction rather than as a conjured novelty, and thus that merely putting a Santa hat onto familiar characters does not leave an audience open-mouthed at the telly people's cute timeliness. They produced a Creek that had a weight that made it special, and that had a series wait on either side that made "Black Canary" still more of a winter island. With no footsteps leading away from it.