Sister Boniface Mysteries: "A Beautiful World" (BBC-TV, UKTV, Britbox, PBS, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

After the Father Brown episode on November 2, KPBS showed a Sister Boniface Mysteries episode called “A Beautiful World” which centered around Minerva, an Avon-like multi-level marketing makeup company that came to the town of Great Slaughter in central England and started pushing their wares. The boss is Jean Pettifer (Crystal Wu – and yes, the actress is visibly Asian but there’s no clue as to why the character should be or how she got such a blandly Anglo name) and her star saleswoman is Mary Flint (Bianca Bardoe). Minerva is sponsoring a competition among the saleswomen (who all wear pink uniforms; at one point I joked, “What is this, British Barbie?”) in which the person who sells the most products within a week will win a box of cosmetics (from a different company, which says a lot about Minerva’s estimate of its own stuff!) and the person who sells the least will be fired. The likely victim of the purge is Iris Gould (Beth Lilly), whose sales have fallen off because Mary has set out to take over many of her customers. She can do this because she has a secret weapon: a remarkable aphrodisiac called Cupid which was a hot seller for Minerva until the government discovered it contained strychnine and had it taken off the market. Only Jean Pettifer had just ordered a large amount of Cupid and decided to sell it as quickly as possible before word of the ban reached Great Slaughter, and it became Mary’s wedge to peel away most of Iris’s customers. Mary even hand-wrote a ledger of her customers with little red hearts drawn next to the ones who were buying Cupid.

Alas, the whole story unravels when Mary falls down dead, poisoned at one of the Minerva sales meetings. Sister Boniface (Lorna Watson) gets the clue when a homeless person steals a jar of Cupid pills from a trash can (a “bin,” they’d call it in Britain), gobbles them down and becomes incredibly horny, hitting on virtually every woman (aside from Sister Boniface; there are limits, after all!) in sight. Ultimately, just as writer Dan Muirden has carefully set us up to believe that Iris is an innocent victim, she’s revealed [spoiler alert!] as Mary’s killer; she took some rat poison and spiked Mary’s drink with it, causing her to start foaming at the mouth just before she expired in full view of all the other Minerva girls. There’s also a comic-relief plot in which an ancient townswoman named Mrs. Clam (Belinda Lang) agrees to apply to Minerva as Mary’s replacement. She’s really been recruited by Father Brown and official police detective Sam Gillespie (Max Brown) to infiltrate Minerva’s operation looking for clues as to who could have killed Mary, but she knows the other Great Slaughter residents so well she’s able to sell them effectively and she wins the cosmetics gift bag that was the first prize in the sales contest (ya remember the sales contest?). I’ve come to like these British mysteries a great deal even though they’re pretty unexciting by American standards – or maybe because they’re pretty unexciting by American standards: they offer a charming gloss on the whole idea of homicide whereas U.S. mysteries (especially recent ones) really throw the gory details in our faces.