> Buy the complete original series boxset on Amazon.
> Buy Series 5 on DVD on Amazon.
Episode 1: ‘The Letters Of Septimus Noone’
Friday 28 February 2014, 9pm
When a classic locked room novel is turned into a West End musical, one of its stars falls victim to a real-life ‘impossible crime’.
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.
But can Creek – now a happily married man – even be persuaded to embark upon the investigation? As he and his wife Polly struggle to come to terms with a sudden personal tragedy, a series of dark and disturbing family secrets are about to emerge that will throw the couple’s whole world into turmoil…
Episode 2: ‘The Sinner and the Sandman’
Friday 7 March 2014, 9pm
A retired local psychic inadvertently makes the most amazing and impossible prediction of his career. As Creek and Polly strive to settle into rural life, they find their apparently serene country village is riddled with all manner of strange and disturbing undercurrents…
Trouble is already brewing in the nearby community centre – recently reopened after a major face-lift – where a sordid sex scandal is about to break, casting a pall of gloom over the celebrations. And at the vicarage, the arrival of a new baby is overshadowed by tales of a “weird hump-backed beast”, that has been seen prowling in the garden by night and foraging through the rubbish bags for foodstuffs.
Even the Creek residence is struck by misfortune, as the prospect of a plague of deadly Japanese Knotweed threatens to trigger wide-scale panic throughout the village. And after a whole slew of other unfortunate events, there are fears that some strange parochial Apocalypse is about to dawn.
Jonathan Creek, meanwhile, finds himself paying a charitable call on the eccentric Mr Eric Ipswich – aka ‘The Amazing Astrodamus’ – an ancient and reclusive former psychic magician who will shortly bring the village to a standstill by pulling off the most baffling act of clairvoyance in history. And what is behind the macabre recurring dream that continues to haunt Creek’s wife Polly… in which the kindly children’s nursery character The Sandman is transformed into a dark and chilling figure of evil?
Episode 3: ‘The Curse Of The Bronze Lamp’
Friday 14 March 2014, 9pm
A wealthy kidnap victim appears to pull off a mind-boggling act of teleportation to alert the police to her whereabouts. Just when married life for Creek and Polly couldn’t be sweeter, the first signs of conjugal friction are beginning to appear on the horizon…
A chance meeting one day with a stunning young weather forecaster is about to sow the seeds of insecurity in Polly’s mind – especially when it emerges that her husband and the glamorous Daisy Shand share a rather unusual and intimate secret in the past. And there are parallel rumblings in the life of the Creeks’ new cleaning lady Denise, who is constantly offloading all her marital problems with apparent relish. Relations with her bovine husband Dean, it seems, are at such a low ebb she’s decided to turn to the commercial sector for sexual fulfilment…
Too much information, the Creeks may feel, as she details her plans for a night of sin with a hunky young male escort. But when the evening takes a sudden tragic turn they are inevitably called in to help… and so begins a bizarre spiral of events involving mistaken identity, the disposal of a dead body, and a miraculous act of teleportation that leaves even Jonathan Creek lost for words. Is it too fanciful to attribute these magical developments to the rusty old Aladdin’s lamp that Denise recently unearthed at a car boot sale?
And as if life weren’t complicated enough, there is the arrival one morning of a shocking photograph in the mail destined to send a shiver down Polly’s spine. Who took it? And who sent it? And most terrifyingly, is there a chance, as Creek suggests, that it might be about to go viral?
Finally, what is going on behind the net curtains at the apparently innocent riverside home of parish magazine editor Horace Greeley? And what is the strange dark secret being nursed by his elderly twin sisters?
Are you looking forward to the new series? Let us know below…