Jonathan Creek’s Last Misdirection

[Jonsmad]

So I’m a big fan of David Renwick, including Jonathan Creek. So I would recommend from Idiot Box books – The Fantom Of The Acropolis.  Not a novel. It’s a script of an unproduced Jonathan Creek story play with a magic stage show inside it. I’ve got it, and am about to read it.     

But this is a post about how Renwick misdirected unused scripts into the actual show. It’s clear to me that Series 5’s setting of Creek was a way to amalgamate bits from the aborted ITV scripts for the show “Ergo”, with it’s uncomfortable couple trapped in a new house situation with village life then imposing upon them. Renwick walked away from that show due to ITV being twats.

But what I suspected when I read the blurb for this stage script has come to be true. This stage show idea was reworked into the series 5

episode The letters of Septimus Noone. The Fantom show becoming the yellow room in that. 

This last fact then is the twist but it doesn’t really give away anything more of the new script book as I havnt read it. Maddy aka Caroline Quentin returns in the book.

So she was very nearly in that episode then, she would have been written as Ridley’s older female relative a role that Raquel Cassidy

from Lead Ballon played in the final version of the episode for TV.  Fans were so close then getting a reunion of the original line up. Something Renwick offers here in this script form. There it was hidden in plain sight, the magic of the rewrite. 

Topic

[Warbodog]

Series 5 did seem to make some inexplicably bizarre choices in its setup, so it’s good to learn that they were explicable after all.

I have the old The World of Jonathan Creek companion (up to series 3) which includes a mystery you can try to solve yourself and win a prize, but I suspect the competition’s expired now.

[Jonsmad]

Yes I’ve got that book as well. 

Now I’m reading the play, it incorporates a few episodes into the script like it picks best bits to re do, and it’s now clear that Katherine Parkinson’s Nurse character in “The Grinning Man”’is also a re-write of Maddy returning as a character. So that’s twice she’s been hiding in episodes for years. What a ghost! 

[Author]

Replies