Returning: Jonathan Creek

A one-off special episode of Jonathan Creek will screen on the ABC next Sunday night at 8:30pm.

The special, which aired on New Year’s Day in the UK, is the first episode made in five years.

Alan Davies returns as an eccentric magician’s assistant who also solves seemingly supernatural mysteries. For “The Grinning Man” he is joined by Sheridan Smith instead of Caroline Quentin or Julia Sawalha. She plays another paranormal investigator. Another 90 minute special will be broadcast at Easter 2010 in the UK.

At midnight on Midsummer’s Day 1938, a famous Harvard geneticist, Eli Mencken, accepts a challenge to spend the night inside a gloomy old attic room where the ghost of a madman is said to prey upon human flesh. The next morning, he has impossibly vanished; the only clue to his disappearance being a trail of grisly ectoplasm on the bed.

Seventy years on, the strange, unexplained events in the so-called ‘Nightmare Room’ of the gothic house now known as ‘Metropolis’ continue…

When two young women take shelter there one night from a raging thunderstorm, it’s not long before the ominous ‘presence’ claims another victim.

Determined to get to the truth about what has happened to her friend, the fearlessly sceptical Joey Ross (Sheridan Smith) finds herself working alongside veteran lateral thinker Jonathan Creek (Alan Davies), as together they embark on a complex and often dangerous investigation which only continues to deepen as a number of unexplained mysteries take place around them…

Who is behind the ingenious abduction of magician Lance Gessler’s (Nicholas Boulton) beautiful young assistant Elodie (Jenna Harrison) after one of her death-defying performances? What secrets lie buried in the tomb of Gessler’s sinister grandfather who was said to communicate with the dead? What dark and tragic past continues to haunt the magician’s mother, Constance, and can she unlock her childhood memories to furnish a vital clue to the puzzle?

And above all, what strange unholy power resides in the grotesque old portrait of a grinning man that hangs on the attic wall? Is it possible that these enigmas are all connected? Once again, Jonathan must use his formidable powers of deduction to shed light on the riddle, but will he be eclipsed by the sheer raw intuition of his younger counterpart?