Monday's Jonathan Creek, Spoilers and nitpicking ahead.

TV Monday night's special episode of Jonathan Creek was fairly entertaining for much of its duration, not least for Who fans of a certain vintage for featuring Paul McGann and Sheridan Smith, the Eighth Doctor and Lucie Miller from the Big Finish / BBC Radio 7 audios in a few scenes together (c'mon Steven, look at them, you know you want to...)

David Renwick's scripts for Creek have always required a certain suspension of disbelief from the audience because of the outlandish unravelling of the mysteries. Much of the time that's been relatively easy to do because all of the information has been available, you just needed to be looking the right place and at the climax I've generally been very impressed with the narrative slight of hand, which is how it should be.

Monday night's story The Judas Tree failed, right at the end, because it expected the audience to swallow two facts and this is your final spoiler warning.

(1), (a) or firstly, a woman was apparently murdered (in order to frame someone), but it turned out it was in fact a double, the woman and her husband being culpable. There's no indication that the victim has received any plastic surgery and yet we're told because the locals don't really know who the apparently but not really deceased wife is, and because the husband identifies the body as his wife, no one in the process from the body being picked up to the ambulance-men, the police, the coroner and the people at the funeral home (and this is specified in the dialogue) noticed that the person being buried was not the wife. In the forensic 2010s.

Secondly, the husband and wife are summoned to a rendezvous with Creek and his assistant where the secrets are revealed. They each thought the other had asked them to meet. Then it's revealed the housekeeper texted each of them apparently anonymously in order to create the meeting. How is this possible without the caller id indicating that the text wasn't coming from the spouse's mobile? Even if the housekeeper managed to procure a disposable phone and the two relevant telephone numbers, why would these two deeply suspicious people turn up together at a moment when they really should be apart due to a pre-ordained plan?

Nitpicking? Certainly. But it's disappointing that Renwick, who's usually so good at spotting these kinds of inconsistencies seems to have gotten lost somewhere in there. I'd also worked out the two other big mysteries in the episode as soon as I'd seen them. That doesn't feel right either.