Father Brown: "The Show Must Go On" (BBC Studios, Britbox, American Public Television, PBS, copyright 2022, released 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger's Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, November 11) I watched a Father Brown episode called “The Show Must Go On” after an unnamed episode of the show on just before it, Hope Street, a contemporary policier set in a small town in Northern Ireland. Aside from one of the regular characters being a Lesbian, the Hope Street show was an odd one about a flock of homing pigeons being stolen, and the thief turns out to be the owner’s wife, who wanted to get rid of the birds because he’s literally developed a life-threatening allergy to them. The Father Brown episode was considerably better: it was about an amateur theatrical troupe called the Kembleford Players who are producing Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. Only Jeremy Sandford (Mark Fleischmann), who’s playing the male lead, Benedick, is found poisoned with pesticide fed to him in his ubiquitous whiskey flask. (Previously his leading lady had complained that she could always smell whiskey on his breath.) Father Brown (Mark Williams), who’s been drafted for a role in the production as – what else? – a friar, naturally investigates, though it’s a refreshing change from where this show usually goes that not only is he getting along with the representative of official law enforcement, Sgt. Goodfellow (John Burton), Goodfellow is drafted into the cast as a replacement Benedick.

Of course the good sergeant immediately orders the arrest of the most obvious suspect, Thomas Church (Jack Loxton), whose right arm is partially paralyzed from an accident with the same sort of pesticide. His motive is presumed to be that Jeremy was trying to seduce Church’s fiancée, Penny Briggs (Helena Barlow), but in the end Father Brown deduces that Jeremy’s murder had something to do with the swindle Jeremy was running in London in the guise of an “investment company.” Jeremy had extracted the life savings of more than one local woman, and it turns out the murderer was [spoiler alert!] Charlotte “Charlie” Maidland (Sonita Henry), wife of Patrick Maidland (Sam Phillips). It seems that Jeremy and Patrick were old college buddies and Jeremy had recruited him to be his accomplice in the fraud – and Charlotte’s homicidal rage at Jeremy was because he’d been able to persuade her husband to participate in his swindle for the promise of a share in the illegal proceeds … which, of course, Jeremy never delivered. At just 45 minutes, Father Brown can’t have the depth and richness of Midsomer Murders, which is twice as long, but that also means the writers (here, Tahsin Guner and Sarah-Louise Hawkins) don’t have to work as hard and seemingly have virtually the entire cast arrested at the end. It works as well as it does largely due to the pitch-perfect performance of Mark Willliams in the title role as a busybody Roman Catholic priest who helps the local constabulary solve murders whether they want him to or not.