Father Brown: "The Tanganyika Green" (BBC, 2017)

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

Last night (Saturday, September 16) my husband Charles and I watched a 2017 Father Brown episode called “The Tanganyika Green” on KPBS and then a 1941 movie on Turner Classic Movies called Out of the Fog. The Father Brown mystery turned out to be a droll little 45-minute show about a middle-aged white doctor, Aldous Kemp (Richard Huw), who shows up at a small town in central England with a Black daughter, Grace (Pepter Lunkuse). Her existence is explained by the not-so-good doctor as stemming from his relationship with a Tanganyikan woman he lived with when he was working in Africa for the British post office there (remember this show is set in the 1950’s when Tanganyika was still a British colony), though I wish the show’s casting people, Julia Crampie, Gemma Hancock and Liz Stoll, could have found a lighter-skinned actress to play this role who would have been more believable as the offspring of a mixed-race relationship. The titular “Tanganyika Green” is a set of four ultra-rare postage stamps Aldous Kemp stole from the Tanganyikan post office during the time he worked there and then smuggled into England. When Aldous Kemp is found dead – poisoned by a spiked drink – the local police officer, Sergeant Goodfellow (John Burton), depicted as a total idiot who makes Inspector Lestrade seem like Sherlock Holmes by comparison and who’s forever telling Father Brown to butt out and threatening to arrest him for withholding information, first arrests Grace (because she’s an aspiring medical student who therefore knows about poisons and she mixed the drink, or at least its licit ingredients) and then targets her boyfriend, John Hammond (Bradley Hall), son of local antiques dealer Frank Hammond (Gary Oliver).

All this is happening in the middle of a local county fair at which one of the concessionaires is a no-good slimeball named Wynford Collins (Miles Jupp). Collins’s scam is to offer to value antiques owned by the locals and deliberately under-report what they’re worth so he can pick them up for pittances and resell them for a dishonest profit. Father Brown eventually deduces that Wynford Collins also killed Aldous Kemp, and the motive had something to do with the fact that they were both in on the theft of the Tanganyika Green stamps way back when, though exactly why Collins felt the need to kill Kemp remains something of a mystery. It’s a droll little program (“droll” is an adjective I keep returning to about this show), boosted by the two women in Father Brown’s household, his maidservant Mrs. McCarthy (Sorcha Cusack) and his younger, sexier personal assistant, Bunty (Emer Kenny), who electrifies the screen in every sequence in which she appears. But what really makes this show work is Mark Williams’ delightfully droll (there’s that word again!) performance as Father Brown, a character created by G. K. Chesterton and written here by Catherine Skinner as a charming busybody who easily outdoes that stupid local cop at solving murders. There’s also a charming plot twist in that when she first meets Father Brown, Grace Kemp insists she’s an atheist and gives Father Brown a free-thought book on man’s relationship with nature, but by the end of the episode the support she got from Father Brown in fighting for her innocence leads her to think that just maybe there might be a God.