Something Old: Banacek (1972-74)

Something New: Jonathan Creek (1998-2008)

Banacek was an early 1970’s American television show about a slightly annoying man who investigated impossible crimes.

Actually, I’ve found that men and women who saw the show when they were young now have one of two different memories of it.

Men: “Banacek had the ultimate male lifestyle fantasy, with a mansion in old-town Boston, exotic cars, a high-paying, freelance job, and pretty girls at his beck and call.”

Women: “Banacek was a smarmy, smirking pig, and if he’d been a real person no self-respecting woman would have touched him with a ten-foot pole.”

Having recently watched all the episodes, I’ve got to side with the ladies.

Banacek was actually based on the movie The Thomas Crown Affair. In the movie, of course, the investigator is Faye Dunaway and McQueen plays the crook, but apparently the network didn’t like the idea of a criminal as the main character. So in the show, Banacek plays the freelance insurance investigator who in return for recovering stolen money, valuable art, or high tech machinery, charges 10% of the value of the item recovered. He’s only called in as a last resort when the insurance company can’t recover the item themselves, and don’t want to pay off on the policy.

His main rival is one of the insurance companies’ employees, Carly, and like just about every other continuing character on the show, she was even more annoying than Banacek. The producers of the show apparently couldn’t decide what to do with this character, since she was variously sleeping with Banacek, not sleeping with him but jealous, engaged to his most acrimonious rival, and, in one episode, his assistant!

There were other competing insurance investigators, and they all exhibited a small-minded dog-in-the-manger meanness that by comparison made Banacek look like a saint. And even his driver Jay, who was used mainly for comic relief, was introduced in an episode in which he tried to undercut Banacek’s work and take his commission for himself.

So why would anyone watch this show? Well, beyond the trappings, the main point of Banacek was that in his role of freelance insurance investigator, he was faced with what seemed to be an impossible theft each week. While there were a couple of complete clunkers, in general the quality of the impossible crimes was very high indeed. Some of these were re-used from earlier books and short stories, but not particularly well-known ones, so they should stymie most viewers, and others were brand new. In one example, we witness a guard get on an elevator carrying a briefcase full of cash. It’s a special elevator designed to go to only one other floor. But when it arrives, the guard is gone, and the briefcase is empty. In addition to the original and clever idea, this episode was one of the few that developed the plot and added important clues throughout the show. For most of them, you can watch the first five minutes and the last five minutes and still get all the value out of them.

In the end Banacek lasted only 17 episodes, and that was probably a few too many.

Jonathan Creek was a late 1990’s British televison show about a slightly annoying man who investigated impossible crimes. Jonathan works as an illusion designer for a famous stage magician, and therefore has exactly the kind of tricky mind needed to help reporter Maddy Magellan figure out the strange crimes she likes to investigate.

Unlike Banacek, this show thrived on the relationship between two adult characters, although that relationship cannot be said to be healthy. Maddy is driven, talkative, frank, and impulsive, while Jonathan is unambitious, introspective, and geeky. Each is ready with a snappy insult at any moment to keep other people at a distance, and these insults keep flying even after they grudgingly acknowledge that they like each other.

Every episode has Maddy trying to whip up Jonathan’s analytical interest in a crime that’s been committed, which with rare exception turns out to have been impossible. Again unlike Banacek, the show is gripping from start to finish, with excellent and fair clueing both to the criminal’s identity and the impossible method. Like Banacek, the impossibilities are the real star of the show, and series writer David Renwick put together a doozy for nearly ever show.

A few of them were, I believe, original problems and solutions on Renwick’s part. We have a woman who dreams real-life events that she could have had no knowledge of, a killer who walks into a garage and disappears, and, in one of the best, a woman is seen to enter a room via a window and disappear. The window and only door to the room remain under observation constantly, but the woman can’t be found in the quite literally empty room.

Here again many of the impossible gimmicks are old wine in new bottles. One of the most baffling episodes is Mother Redcap, which combines an ancient locked room murder method with an ingenious idea contained in a little known story by Peter and Anthony Shaffer from the London Mystery Magazine. Another episode is a clever variation on an idea from Herman Landon. But whenever Renwick does this he adds enough twists and turns that the origins are unrecognizable until you see the final solution.

And, anyway, who am I to complain about a wonderful detective show that has a mix of something old, and something new?

Bonus Bookfling: A new Jonathan Creek is filming now! This new Christmas special will be shown in the UK in December 2008. Watch for it in the US on BBC America. Canada, I don’t know what you’re going to do.

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