Alan Davies will once again try to unpick a fiendish crime as lateral-thinking sleuth Jonathan Creek, which is returning to the BBC for the first time since 2014.

He stars alongside Sarah Alexander and Warwick Davies in the one-off episode Daemon’s Roost, about a horror director who dies in a haunted house that may once have been used for satanic rituals.

Davies talked up the episode of the David Renwick-penned comedy drama, first shown in 1997, as being the “spookiest ever”, with Creek put in “real danger”. Shane Allen, who commissioned the show for the BBC, praised it as “sublime and intricately conceived” and “a pioneering class act and evergreen favourite”. An air date hasn’t been announced.

Creek’s last outing was praised in the Guardian as “an intricate machine with hundreds of pieces that has been lovingly assembled by hand until it all fits into place and works, like clockwork”.

Following that series, Davies voiced concerns about the hours he had to work on the show. “As for doing more, it depends how they fit in with family life,” he said in 2014. “I would do them out of loyalty to the writer, David Renwick, but I am looking around at other, more family friendly ways of organising my life because those filming schedules are unforgiving … the schedule, the budget cuts and the pay cuts make the last series a job rather than a pleasure.”