Father Brown:: "The New Order" (BBC-TV, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 8 my husband Charles and I put on KPBS for a recent episode of the long-running BBC-TV series Father Brown, based on a series of stories by G. K. Chesterton about a Roman Catholic priest named Father Brown (Mark Williams) who solves crimes despite the opposition of the local police chief, Inspector Mallory (Jack Dean), who is so closed-minded he makes Inspector Lestrade in the Sherlock Holmes stores seem like a model of enlightenment by comparison. This episode was called “The New Order,” and from the title and the overall time period in which the show takes place (in the late 1940’s, immediately after the end of World War II) I was expecting a story about neo-Nazi diehards setting up shop in Father Brown’s out-of-the-way parish and attempting to overthrow the Britisn government. Instead it’s about penny-pinching Fleet Street publisher Lord Arthur Hawthorne (Matthew March), who is retiring from the paper he’s edited for decades and plans to install his son Gabe (Luke Nunn) in his place – only during the outdoor garden party where he plans to make this announcement, instead he’s shot and wounded with a long rifle.

Inspector Mallory immediately jumps to the conclusion and arrests Stanley Buchanan (Evan Milton), who just returned after a two-year prison sentence for being Gay, which in the immediate aftermath of World War II was still a serious crime in Britain. (It may soon become one in the U.S., or at least in several of the usual-suspect states, if the crazies on the current Supreme Court have their way.) The cops are convinced Stanley was behind the assault on Lord Hawthorne because even before Stanley was arrested, Lord Hawthorne’s paper exposed him as Gay and the police found his love letters to his boyfriend and entrapped him in a restroom. Meanwhile, Father Brown is having his own problems with crazy authority figures: a new man, Canon Damien Fox (Roger May), has been installed as the head of the local church and therefore Father Brown’s superior. When Canon Fox calls Father Brown into his office and tells him to follow orders, Father Brown rather predictably says he follows no one but God, and Canon Fox said, “As far as you are concerned, I am God.” Canon Fox proceeds to frame Father Brown for violating the seal of the confessional – the absolute confidentiality of whatever is said to a priest in the confession booth, or even outside it if it is acknowledged as a formal rite – and suspends him from his ministry. His goal is to excommunicate Father Brown, and to that end he has already prepared proceedings and referred the matter to Rome.

The new priest he intends to install in Father Brown’s place is African-British minister Father Featherstone (Zephryn Taitte), who at one point apologizes to Father Brown for allowing himself to be used in Canon Fox’s scheme and offers to resign the priesthood, but in the end he agrees to leave the parish and volunteer to be a missionary in Swaziland. The main intrigue resolves itself when Stanley Buchanan essentially kidnaps Lord Hawthorne and forces him to drive to a deserted spot (one of the craggy locations the BBC also used to use as alien planets in the Doctor Who shows), where he intends to murder him. Father Brown commandeers a motorcycle and drives out to the cliffside where Stanley is holding Hawthorne, and it turns out that the reason Stanley hates Hawthorne so much is that Hawthorne’s son Gabe was his Gay partner, only Hawthorne protected Gabe and made sure he was never arrested or even suspected. In the end Father Brown not only stops Stanley from murdering Hawthorne, he takes the position of the current Pope (rather than the one who would have been in power in 1947) and says, essentially, “Who am I to judge?”

Though Stanley has started chemical castration treatments to “cure” himself of being Gay (a weird sort of torture the British government frequently forced on suspected or convicted Gays, including the pioneering computer scientist Alan Turing, who committed suicide just two years after being forced to start the treatments), he’s apparnelty not so far along on them that he can’t recover his sexual capacity if he stops them, and in the end Father Brown essentially blesses their union and sends them off to tour the Continent together. Lord Hawthorne agrees to continue as editor of his paper and, after he’s confronted with photos of his extra-relational activities with women other than his wife Margo (Sara Stewart) – who humiliates him by packing all his belongings and forcing him to move out of their home prior to divorcing him, agrees never to print anything more about his son or the man in his life.

I quite liked this show, written by Neil Irvine and directed by Jo Hallows (man or woman? I can’t tell, and their imdb.com page lists nothing about their gender), even though I had mixed feelings about the outrageously anachronistic nature of the plot and its resolution. Even a gentle, loving, humble man like Father Brown would in real life have likely bought into the church’s general condemnation of homosexuality and certainly would not have sent a Gay couple off on a Grand Tour the way he does in this show – and it might have been more powerful if the example of Gabe Hawthorne and Stanley Buchanah had forced him to rethink the whole Gay question instead of just accepting the orthodox view of the time that homosexuality was both a sin against God and an offense against human nature and common decency.