Gorgon's Wood

From the very first episode, I’ve been a huge fan of Jonathan Creek. David Renwick’s brilliant scripts are both very clever and very witty – and that’s a dazzling trick for any writer to pull off. The stories are updates of the classic ‘impossible crime’ mystery, and Renwick’s achievement is to show that even a supposedly ‘played-out’ type of story can be revived if the writer doing the reviving is gifted enough. I’ve never met him, but I much admire both this series and that superb, and equally original, comedy series ‘One Foot in the Grave’.

I’ve just taken another look at one of the later Creek shows, ‘Gorgon’s Wood’. A celebrity chef owns a priceless statue of a Chinese monk and is persuaded to lend it to a museum. But while the curator communes with the statue in private, it disappears – but where? Once Creek comes on the scene, the culprit is soon discovered, but that is far from the end of the story. As often in this series, there are several very dark twists as well as plenty of light moments.

I thoroughly enjoyed this episode on a second viewing. And – trivia alert! - I was intrigued to discover that actress who played the curator’s very glamorous daughter is Alice Patten, daughter of the former Tory MP and Governor of Hong Kong, Chris Patten.