The Grinning Man

It's difficult to decide whether this or Black Canary is the best ever episode. Sheridan Smith's debut as Joey Ross is a breath of fresh air. She's almost as clever as Jonathan and there's no annoying romantic interest between them. There are some great comic moments as she meets Jonathan for the first time.

The atmosphere for the first half hour or so with the spooky old house in the storm with it's oddball characters and the tale of the nightmare room is superb.

I love the way the episode turns subtly so that the subplot involving a kidnapping takes centre stage and the locked room mystery is almost forgotten about.

The subplot involving Adam Klaus' scheme to invest in 3D porn is mildly amusing - I remember laughing out loud at his and Jonathan's reactions when they were watching it but that scene and much of the rest of this subplot seems to have been cut from subsequent repeats.

This isn't my favorite episode of "Jonathan Creek," but a so-so Jonathan Creek is better than no Jonathan Creek.

This is a grisly one. One rainy evening, two young woman are stranded when their tire goes flat and they have no spare. They are given a ride to a mansion, Metropolis, owned by a stage musician, Lance Gessler. They are to spend the night there. There is one particular attic room where people have disappeared. Mina wants to see it and is escorted there by one of the residents. She makes a pass at him, is rebuffed, and then refuses to leave the room as she's too tired. That turns out to be a mistake.

The other young woman (Sheridan Smith), who has a blog where she solves complex problems, wants to find out out what happened to her friend. Lance's mother, Judy Parfitt, whose father was a famous magician, advises her that she will need help and gets her together with Jonathan (in a very funny scene). The two embark on an adventure together trying to figure out what happened in that room.

The acting is very good, the mystery intriguing if really out there, and a study by Hieronymus Bosch overlooking the proceedings.

I'm afraid the show still hasn't hit it right with sidekicks -- there isn't much chemistry between Smith and Davies here. Caroline Quentin was perfect.

Very dark mystery, a two-hour episode with too much filler involving Jonathan's magician boss, the sex-crazed Adam (Stuart Milligan).

Thoroughly enjoyed Creek during its run, but this is hands-down my favorite episode of the lot. The opening newsreel footage sequence was a stroke of genius, beautifully done, and the episode's ending was one of the most clever, shocking, and thoroughly satisfying conclusions to a mystery that I've ever seen rendered on TV. My only knock against this otherwise perfect episode was its extraneous and inexplicable side-plot involving Adam Klaus's venture into 3-D porn. I'm no prude, but I was left shaking my head and wondering why Renwick saw fit to include it. Not only wasn't it funny, but it added considerable length to the overall narrative and nothing to the main plot. Without it, Renwick could have trimmed the episode down to a manageable 90 to 100 minutes. But with it, the episode weighed in at over two hours. Still, the main plot of THE GRINNING MAN was sufficiently compelling to keep me invested throughout, and again, that ending. Wow. My wife and I sat there with our mouths hanging open like mailbox doors while the credits rolled, and I walked away from this episode thinking that no made-for-TV mystery had left me this satisfied in a very long time. So, hats off to Renwick for taking the time. It was worth the writer's dark night of the soul that he apparently experienced to have made THE GRINNING MAN happen. I, for one, am grateful.

It has been more than four years since the inimitable (can you imagine if Nicholas Lyndhurst had got the role?) Alan Davies donned his duffle coat and applied his lateral mind to a baffling mystery. This time it concerns, typically and wonderfully, a spooky old room in a spooky old house. It's called the Nightmare Room, and - as Judy Parfitt ominously explains - people disappear when they try to stay in it over night; the set up has touches of earlier episodes 'Mother Redcap' and 'Satan's Chimney,' but manages to take its own path. The finest appropriately Gothic touch is the study by Hieronymus Bosch on the wall, smiling out at the poor suckers who think they can outsmart the ghost of some mad old relative kept there years ago. If you think that the episode will end with a confrontation with the ghost, you don't know Jonathan Creek.

I know Jonathan Creek a little too well. This one ranks as a good one, while not quite up there with my favourite, the 1998 Christmas Special 'Black Canary' which co-starred Rik Mayall. The first thing I liked is the show hits the ground running as an episode of Jonathan Creek; locked rooms, magicians and all. No long explanations for the four year gap, mercifully.

The appeal of Jonathan Creek is that of any hardened cynic in a world gone topsy-turvy. When things vanish from or are killed in a locked room with no means of escape or sign of an assailant (as happens in JC slightly more often than in real life), he keeps his head on. In fact he is stimulated; for all he seems relieved at the start to be done with grizzly murders, we know that JC loves the challenge. If you are new to locked-room mysteries, I recommend 'The Hollow Man' by John Dickson Carr, a novel that tells you everything you need to know about LRMs (and the finest of all, Gaston Leroux's 'The Mystery of the Yellow Room'). These give you an indication of how to apply logic to a locked room mystery, although I concede that my logic failed me last night and I had no idea how it would resolve itself (well, a bit of an idea, but hardly the whole solution). Unlike a real magic trick, where the presentation is everything and the explanation is banal, the mystery aspect of Jonathan Creek makes the mechanics of the trick an added delight. There are several methods of explaining the inexplicable on Jonathan Creek. Two relatively common ones are the variants that a) it looked odd but relatively straightforward but turns out to be the result of something much more sinister, or b) it looked incredibly sinister but turned out to be something surprisingly (and sometimes pleasingly) straightforward. The fact is we want to be surprised - some of us want to be the smartest guy in the room and say they worked it all out, but I can honestly say I've never fully worked out an episode of JC (maybe one or two from the fourth series, but even it has the superb 'Tailor's Dummy' episode).

The characters who hang around the bizarre old mansion - called 'Metropolis' and surely a reference to Charles Foster Kane's 'Xanadu', as is the opening news reel - are all appropriately suspicious. David Renwick, who has written every episode of the show (as well as One Foot In The Grave, also about a likable, cynical grump; he also directs this episode), is a natural at the mystery genre. He presents the possible suspects without making any big deal, and leaves it to the audience to take stock and evaluate. As always the biggest question is not 'who done it?' so much as 'how?' There is at least one red herring. 'Jonathan Creek' tells ghost stories then explains how there are no ghosts; with episodes like this and Black Canary it gets to have its cake and eat it too, going for creepy effects and later explaining them with a satisfyingly logical conclusion.

If there are imperfections in this show, they are not major. I would say that two hours of running time was perhaps a little inflated; this story could have been told in 90 minutes, like Black Canary, and perhaps would have a little more punch. Sheridan Smith was fine as the assistant (/sidekick?), coming on board when her own friend disappears in The Nightmare Room, and I liked the idea of one who was a match for his expertise, but the two still lacked the chemistry of Maddie and JC from the earlier series (this is not to say I'd love Caroline Quentin to come back, as I think perhaps that chemistry might not return anyway). Stuart Milligan is back as magician Adam Klaus, who Creek designs the tricks for but who never seems to shape his own public persona quite the way he'd like it; whenever he gets close, his ego gets in the way.

I hope there are more episodes to come. I'd settle for the occasional Christmas Special, to be sure. Renwick stopped doing the series in 2004 because he felt he was running out of ideas; the conceits that keep the show moving. I wonder if he thinks of an ingenious solution then works backwards to fill it out to a story, or he thinks of a deliciously eerie set-up first then has to figure out how to tie the whole thing up. An annual, or at least occasional, Christmas special might be less pressure to churn out idea after idea. I will be thoroughly satisfied if they are as good as 'The Grinning Man,' which is an excellent addition to the series and a good episode for people who have somehow managed to miss the lateral vs. paranormal dealings of Jonathan Creek the first time round.

The Grinning Man rates as one of the very best episodes in the series, it's wonderfully clever, baffling, intriguing and of course deliciously macabre.

Plenty of strands, there are stories within stories, there is so much going on. They all of course come together very neatly. I'm reminded a bit of Satan's Chimney, it's a similar story.

Sheridan Smith is wonderful, I only wish she'd gotten to appear in a lot more episodes, the pair worked very well together. An acting masterclass from Judy Parfitt.

Great laughs from Adam Klaus and Candy, I thought she was lovely in this.

We needed more like this, 9/10.