TV Crime Log: Silk, Creek
If any of you here like your crime dramas with wigs and gowns you may want to consider the third series of Silk, starting tonight on BBC1 at 9pm.
The series follows a group of London barristers who go to court wearing ridiculous headgear. It follows their cases, their lives, their loves, etcetera. Former barrister Peter Moffat is the writer. He has form for this kind of thing, having written both North Square and Criminal Justice. Silk is based on Moffat’s experiences at the Bar.
This blog will go into recess to consider the blurb, m’lud:
Clive has finally become a Silk but his celebration party is dramatically cut short when news of the arrest of the son of the Head of Chambers for killing a police officer reaches the celebrations. Martha must step in to defend the young man despite the overwhelming evidence.
Can Clive help Martha ask the tough questions needed and can Martha uncover the truth about what happened in time? Meanwhile Billy is struggling to cope with his secret and a new Practice Manager sends ripples through the Clerks Room.
Him from Whitechapel is in it, and her from that grim thing about the village.
The BBC really can’t cure itself of its Jonathan Creek addiction. The first series started way back in 1997. It goes away for a few years, then comes back for the odd one-off, then goes away, and now it’s come back again for a new three-episode series. Alan Davies is the poodle-haired former magician’s assistant who solves impossible mysteries - and he’s back with yet another leading lady.
Davies stepped into the role of Creek after a number of other people wouldn’t, or couldn’t do it. Nicholas Lyndhurst was offered it, and Rik Mayall couldn’t do it. Hugh Laurie turned it down and then drifted into obscurity.
The first episode is a nice nod to the first locked-room mystery story, by Gaston Leroux.
The Mystery of the Yellow Room, based on a 19th-century story by Gaston Leroux, is currently thrilling London theatre audiences with its enticing blend of music, romance and sizzling Gothic melodrama.
But events take a sinister turn one night when the show’s glamorous singing sensation Juno Pirelli is found horribly stabbed inside a locked dressing room, from which no assailant could possibly have escaped.
No weapon or any other evidence of an intruder can be found, nor any rational explanation for the victim’s wounds.
As the actress’s life hangs in the balance, her producer and colleagues remain baffled. And attention once again turns to the lateral-thinking Jonathan Creek for a solution to the whole grisly puzzle.
I believe I’m almost certainly correct in suggesting that Jonathan Creek is on Friday night at 9pm, BBC1 - in episodes written, as always, by the superlative David Renwick. Now, all this talk of barristers has, heh, made me want a coffee.
