A hundred and fifty years later, the house is occupied by Nathan Clore, a veteran horror film director with secrets of his own. And the last special ‘The Savant’s Thumb’ yes had a disappearing body, but also fifteen others kinds of thing including girls dying with circles on their foreheads and a painting coming to life…frankly, anyone who kept all that straight in their head did a better job than me. Subsequent events, with a man changing his physical appearance in a matter of seconds while threatening the journalist who wrote the review, also prompt several questions. The only alternative suspect is the artist's wife who was well aware of his affair with another woman, but how could she have left her city office without her personal assistant seeing her leave?

I’ll bet the Thrupenny Bit from my Christmas pud that David Renwick has, at some point, seen the utterly terrible ‘tits n’ gore’ Italian horror film, Bloody Pit of Horror. Gur bayl cneg bs gur fbyhgvba V qvfyvxr vf Elzna vzcrefbangvat n ubzr frphevgl rkcreg sbe frireny qnlf. A former glamour model, now living quietly with her rich, older husband in the countryside, is seriously injured when her garden shed explodes, leaving her badly burned. One of the things I liked best about it was the fact that Warwick Davies played the vicar (very well) but there was no ‘thing’ about his height. As Jonathan investigates the murder, Maddy and a new friend are investigating the derelict Mother Redcap Inn, where seven people apparently died of fright after looking out the window in the same room.The episode is available on Netflix in the UK and Ireland and the entire series is available on DVD in the UK and other countries, including a comprehensive box set of all the episodes, released by the BBC. A painting disappears from a locked room and the owner, theatre critic Sylvester Le Fley, offers a large reward for its recovery, which tempts Maddy. It really feels like the ship has course corrected after the last series, and Daemons’ Roost reminds us how compelling the show can be.

And if this turns out to be the final episode, and Creek’s last bow, then it is a fitting ending to the whole 20 years of impossible mysteries. Desperate measures are required to get him to help, but the only clue he will reveal is that a spam sandwich is involved. Through various hammy acting and vocal sound effects he tracks down and threatens Creek, before drawing a knife and forcing the detective to trap him in a fiery pit, left, presumably, to die. The more ‘phoney’ wordplay throughout the episode was a stretch, and there seemed to be a lot of padded out extra twists and turns that, although tied together by Renwick, could have been left behind.Pictured: Happier days… As the series wore on the impossibilities became slightly more abtruse — series four’s ‘The Tailor’s Dummy’ is probably about a man changing race on the spot, but also about a man jumping out of a window; ‘The Chequered Box’ has a weird impossibility which could be resolved in about four seconds but isn’t really an impossibility from the key character’s perspective; and whatever the hell ‘Gorgon’s Wood’ is about I honestly don’t know. I too loved the references back to the show's past, and it was a neat idea to have Jonathan stalked by someone he helped put away previously (the culprit in the 'House of Monkeys' episode - although he wasn't actually seen in that particular episode). Jonathan sets out to find Tracy and discover whether Roy is telling the truth or not, but what connection does Tracy's disappearance have with the Creed of Eden, an Earth-loving cult that Roy is a member of? A pity she was unable to join the show for a full series as her character is sweet, sassy, charming, quirky and appealing - plus, she can give Creek a run for him money when it comes to solving mysteries.

The last full series of Jonathan Creek, back in 2014, divided critics and audience; at the time our own reviewer complained that the central mysteries lacked the intricacy and peril of previous instalments, and there was a feeling that the spark had gone out of the show ever since Creek put away his duffel coat and moved out of the windmill. He summons Alison back to the house to tell her the truth, before being paralysed by a stroke and unable to spill his secret. His third, surviving, daughter Alison is now an adult and found herself summoned to see Clore just before his death.

While it’s great to still have Alan Davies’ detective on our screens, you can’t help but go into this new episode with a certain amount of trepidation. Details about Jonathan’s early life have been fairly scant over the series and the sudden decision to flesh out his backstory and explore his memories could easily have been taken further had other stories followed. With his health failing, Clore has summoned home his stepdaughter Alison, to finally share with her the chilling truth of what happened to her family there when she was a child. Then everyone starts talking about a warlock or something who would kill men by propelling them through the air into a fiery furnace while their lovers watched…but this might also just be a fictional thing from a horror movie directed by the stepfather. It also requires about four things to happen perfectly, and the evidence available afterwards — Jonathan knows about it, because he tells Polly about it (we’ll come back to Polly, she’s not blameless here), so therefore the police do too — only serves to point to the husband more (and, no, I’m not talking about the ‘Anti- Money’ thing, though that was equally bloody stupid; I mean the note left in the book she’s reading…how does someone from outside know which book she’s reading?

Where simple locked rooms become sinister dark cages, glasses of water become fierce and sharp and something so simple as why a book would be too far forward on a shelf is imbued with twisted and cryptic meaning. It was ‘The Three Gamblers’, the final episode of Season 3, the final featuring Caroline Quentin’s Maddie, and very much the end of an era. A pop star's husband is baffled as to how a woman he had an affair with can regrow a full head of hair barely two days after she had it all hacked off in a hoax kidnap ransom video. Jonathan, for his part, is more concerned as to how a piece of chewing gum got moved from one potted plant to another at the crime scene.Given the lack of a clear and engaging problem, I found this story thread fairly effective and I felt that the explanations provided had some interesting components and ideas to them. Polly’s idea of fun for the couple now involves downscaling, decluttering old magic memorabilia and junk from the windmill – given its first glimpse in years – and entering the village local scarecrow competition. It’s woefully out of its time but struggling on nonetheless, given some reprieve simply because it’s almost defiantly unlike its murder-mystery counterparts. However, a reliable, independent witness insists she spoke to the unharmed woman several hours later as she went to church.