Father Brown: "The Royal Visit" (BBC-TV, PBS, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I watched a couple of interesting things on TV, including a current (2023) episode of the long-running Father Brown series on PBS courtesy of the BBC. Father Brown was a character created by author G. K. Chesterton that, at least in his TV incarnation, is a middle-aged Roman Catholic priest in central England in the mid-1950’s who helps the local police solve crimes and frequently, like so many other fictional private detectives (as well as some real ones), annoys the police by being right when they’ve got a case wrong. This episode was called “The Royal Visit” and dealt with a planned library opening that was supposed to be attended by Princess Margaret (Olivia Benjamin), younger sister of Queen Elizabeth II and the long-time Queen’s only sibling of either gender. The royal family sends a detail to the small town where Father Brown works to coordinate security arrangements with the local police, headed by Inspector Neil Beckett (Tristan Gemmill). Only just two days before Princess Margaret is supposed to arrive for the opening ceremony (the sort of ritual hilariously parodied in the Beatles’ film A Hard Day’s Night when a tailor gets in the face of John Lennon with a measuring tape and John, in a falsetto imitation of the Queen, cuts the tape with a scissors and says, “I now declare this bridge … open!”), the library is found open and vandalized, and its elderly caretaker, Raymond “Ray” Harrison (Gary Lilburn), dead.

While the city government recruits volunteers to clean up the mess and restore the library to correct order, the police fasten on Amanda Clement (Sarah Smart) and arrest her as the murderess. The royal office in London sends word to the village that Princess Margaret’s visit will be canceled unless someone is charged for the murder and bound over for trial before the Princess arrives. Only it turns out that Clement is actually the victim’s daughter, and had helped him get the job even though Ray is an inveterate criminal and has built up quite a collection of objects he’s pilfered from various townspeople over the years – including a cigarette lighter belonging to Princess Margaret herself that one of her aides borrowed for her own use. (The real Princess Margaret was a heavy smoker and this is believed to have led to her death from a stroke – her fourth – at age 71 in February 2002, over 20 years before her older sister.) Eventually Father Brown deduces from an old 1937 newspaper which Ray had a copy of – his copy disappeared after his death but someone remembered seeing him with it and Father Brown was able to figure out when the paper was from based on the witness’s memory that it had a headline about a soccer match on the front page, and it contained a photo of a detail of a group of then-convicts assigned to tear down a disused factory) – that Inspector Beckett was the killer. He was afraid that Ray would reveal his true identity and cost him his gig at the Palace, so he killed Ray and made it look like a drunken accident or the work of someone else. In the end Beckett is arrested just as he and Amanda Clement are about to go on a date – he’s by far the cutest guy in the dramatis personae and he’s offered to take her to dinner, though he really plans to kill her – and the royal visit goes ahead as scheduled. I was a bit surprised that they actually used an on-screen actress to play Princess Margaret – I had assumed they’d just hint at her presence the way Jesus was depicted in both the 1926 and 1959 versions of Ben-Hur – but they made her a full-fledged character instead, which was nice.