Paddling her own canoe

COMEDIANS - they seem to be everywhere these days. No longer content with their allotted niche of stand up and sitcom, it seems comics have decided en masse that they should be publishing books, appearing in drama series - taking everyone else's job, really...

Caroline Quentin, best known as Martin Clunes's unimpressed girlfriend in Men Behaving Badly, is following the trend with gusto. Already commissioned by Penguin to write a novel, tonight she takes on a fresh persona as investigative crime writer Maddy Magellan in the BBC's new murder mystery series Jonathan Creek. Like Robbie Coltrane and David Jason before her, Quentin has turned sleuth with the new show, which the BBC sees as its flagship ratings grabber for early summer. Together with fellow comic Alan Davies (who plays the eponymous Creek, and, like Quentin, is a regular guest on Have I Got News for You), Quentin will solve five seemingly impossible crimes, such as how a woman managed to leave her office "invisibly" to kill her husband, or how a corpse materialises from inside a locked cupboard.

Although the scripts for Jonathan Creek are written by One Foot In The Grave creator David Renwick, the new series isn't a comedy, but there are a few gags along the way to keep things relatively light. The closest reference cited by the programme makers is Colombo, with its how did they do that plots and wry asides. It's all rather good fun, and the BBC is confident enough of its success to have already commissioned a second series.

For Quentin, Jonathan Creek is her first steps back into the limelight after the tabloid frenzy last month over the break up of her marriage with Paul Merton ("Have I Got Bad News For You!" shrieked the headlines). Doing the rounds of the British media last week to promote the new show, she said she and Merton "had our ups and downs, and some of the downs were very scary. I think the world of him. I thought we stood a better chance than most".

Like the characters she plays, Caroline Quentin has always had a reputation for not taking things lying down. For the first series of Men Behaving Badly, the male stars earned £8,000 an episode and the women got £1,000, but that was soon put right when she threatened to walk. "It all got rather overexcited in the reporting," she has said. "But I just thought, `Hang on a minute, we seem to be working the same hours'." For those who like jokes about lager and farting, MBB is due back shortly (and is being repeated on Wednesdays on BBC 1 at the moment).

ONE senses this new project is more to Quentin's taste, placing her centre stage as it does. "A lot of weak people have power in this business because it's so so full of insecurity," she told the Radio Times this week. "And that allows bullies to rise to the surface. One of the great benefits of having a say is you don't have to tolerate them."