While not quite the Jonathan Creek news we might have been hoping for, yesterday I stumbled over a crowdfunding project on Kickstarter that is really rather exhilarating: the publication of a new stage play in the canon by none other than series creator David Renwick.

You can find the details at the link above, but the essential idea seems to be that ‘The Fantom of the Acropolis’ is a completely new project devised for the stage, set 10 years after the last TV episode — the problematic and divisive (in that, I didn’t like it) ‘Daemons’ Roost’ (2016) — and sees Jonathan reteam with original sidekick Maddy Magellan to solve…well, who cares? It’s more Jonathan Creek! Surely that’s all you need to know! Though if you need to know more, it’s at the link above, as I said, so go there.

The Kickstarter needs to raise £15,000 by 6th February as the first step towards making the stage play a reality, and if you support it you can receive a copy of the script along with various other rewards depending on your level of contribution. Even if the stage play doesn’t get produced, you would still get the script provided the target total is reached, or so I understand it, so pitch in and own a piece of history.

Yes, Creek declined in its later years, but at its peak it was, and probably remains, the gold standard for impossible crimes and detection on the small screen. It would be almost (ahem) impossible to overstate the influence this show had on my reading, given that it very much the first exposure I had to the subgenre that has gone on to fascinate and beguile me for nearly three decades now, so I am very excited, and I hope anyone reading this is, too.

Head to the link, pledge what you can afford, and let’s hope good news results in this vein in the coming months. And to think people were having a downer on 2025, eh…?