Father Brown: "The Show Must Go On" (Britbox, BBC-TV, PBS, filmed 2022, aired 2023)

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

Last night (Saturday, May 20) my husband Charles and I watched the latest episode of the British TV series Father Brown, based on a character created by G. K. Chesterton: a British Roman Catholic priest in a small town in central England in the early 1950’s who helps the police solve local crimes and frequently annoys them in the process of doing so. This Father Brown episode was called “The Show Must Go On” and listed a 2022 copyright date though it wasn’t shown, even in Britain, until February 17, 2023. It dealt with skullduggery amongst the Kembleford Players, an amateur theatrical group, rehearsing a production of William Shakespeare’s comedy Much Ado About Nothing. It was directed by Miranda Howard-Williams (given the similarity of the last names, I wondered if she’s the wife or a relative of the series’ star, Mark Williams, who plays Father Brown, but there’s no such indication on imdb.com) from a script by Sarah-Louise Hawkins. During a break in one of the play’s rehearsals, leading man Jeremy Sanford (Mark Fleischmann) is found dead of an agricultural pesticide which was fed to him by spiking his omnipresent flask with the poison. It turns out Jeremy Sanford was a con man who had swindled the mother of one of the cast members out of her life’s savings by getting her to “invest” in a fictitious New York financial firm. The daughter sent anonymous letters exposing Sanford both to the local police and to the local newspaper. The director of the play is Patrick Maidland (Sam Phillips) and the original female star is his wife Charlotte, nicknamed “Charlie” (Sonita Henry), only she complains that she can’t stand working with Sanford because his constant drinking from that flask means his breath continually stinks of liquor.

Later Charlotte has a backstage accident and turns up with her leg in a cast, which requires her to be replaced as the leading lady of the play. It turns out that Patrick Maidland and Jeremy Sanford – or “Jonathan Spicer,” as he was previously known – went to college together and even participated in joint business schemes, though Patrick bailed on the partnership when he realized Sanford was actually doing illegal things. The two had matching flasks through which they kept themselves, uh, fortified during their business excursions. It also turns out that his murderer is [spoiler alert!] Charlotte Maidland, who actually took her husband’s flask, had it engraved with the initials “J.S.” (previously both flasks had been blank) and sneaked it into Sanford’s room so he would drink out of it and ingest the poison. I didn’t remember her motive, but Charles did: years before Jeremy was supposed to baby-sit the Maidlands’ infant daughter, but Jeremy left her unattended overnight while going out to do one of his scam presentations, and the baby died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). Like most Father Brown episodes, this one was rather droll and light-hearted; it helps that only one character gets murdered, and it helps even more when we learn that the victim was a scumbag and we’re really not at all sorry to see him go. Charlotte had the play’s prop person make her a fake cast of papier-maché so she could commit a crime requiring full mobility and no one would suspect her because she supposedly had a broken leg and was in a full-length cast for it. Father Brown, who’s in and around the rehearsals because Patrick cast him in the small role of a village friar (talk about acting what you know!), spots this when he sees the inside of the cast and notes when the newspaper inside was dated. Like a lot of British mystery stories, this Father Brown isn’t particularly exciting but it’s highly droll and cute, and there’s an overall warmth about it that’s entertaining and stimulating on its own terms.