cloudsinvenice | Jonathan Creek rewatch: series 1 ep 3: The Reconstituted Corpse

In light of being exhaustedly brainless and fearing the wrath of HTML foul-ups, I decided this very belated post would be both truncated and un-illustrated. For more fully-featured Creek fangirling, see

teylaminh 's journal...

Zooming from studio monitors to their flesh-and-blood subjects, we watch "plastic beauty" Zola Zbzewsky get interviewed for daytime TV. She's promoting her book about how she metamorphosed from 35-year-old shrinking violet to posh totty - with the help of her plastic surgeon and (not sure in what order these two things happened) lover.

R thinks the actress is performing badly, but I say she's playing someone who's plastic in every sense: woodenly trotting out the requisite PR puff to sell her book, having coldly calculated that she could become a star by having plastic surgery and then promoting herself off the back of her true transformation story. R suggests the lines have even been written for her... her book definitely sounds like it was ghosted. Then I mentally slap myself because of course, that'll be Maddy's job... I turn out to be wrong about this, and with a bit of thought, it wouldn't make sense - ghost-writing is a distinct career path and I don't know where she'd have got the time.

They bring the surgeon/ex out for a surprise reunion, and he also over-acts (with an American accent to boot) as things get Jerry Springer-esque. It's funny how quickly we forget the context of these episodes' original airings - if I remember right, the UK was then in the grip of over-the-top American chat shows focusing on dramatic tabloidy stories... which we have since distilled into the homegrown Jeremy Kyle Show. God help us all.

Meanwhile, Jonathan is having problems that defy even my comedy summarisation skills, so let's just quote the theatre manager who makes an emergency call to him:

"We've got a five ton elephant with irritable bowel syndrome stuck inside a metal cage, an audience coming at seven o' clock, and believe me, it's going to take more than a can of air freshener!"

If you think it can't end well, you're right.

Maddy (who, we are intrigued to note, stacks her books in a crammed bookcase: always the standby of the space- and cash-strapped journo/book addict) is having a discouraging lunch with some sort of agentish bod. She pops over the road to buy a wardrobe (it'll matter) while her companion takes a call for her: she's been asked to investigate the murder of The Surgeon Ex (I can't be arsed looking up his name, I'm sorry) - and clear Zola's name.

When Jonathan and Maddy bump into each other, they're in a bar where Maddy is dying the death of a thousand tiny boredoms thanks to a blind date named Shelford who looks like Mark Gatiss in aging make-up. He also says "as t'were" unironically. Sadly, IMDb has just told us that it's actually Nigel Planer ("once considered for the role of Jonathan Creek himself", which we're finding rather hard to envisage). A recurring gag of a man, Shelford will haunt the episode like one of those moths that fastens itself to your window, desperate to ooze through the glass and join you in the lighted interior. Along the way, there will be a wardrobe, a corpse, and a peeping tom with a video camera...