Father Brown: "The Lord of the Dance" (BBC Productions, Britbox, PBS, aired February 27, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Fortunately, the Father Brown episode KPBS showed immediately after the Sister Boniface Mysteries program, “The Lord of the Dance,” on Saturday, February 21, was considerably better. Directed by Caroline Slater from a script by Rebecca Ramsden, “The Lord of the Dance” had to do with a self-important and spoiled rich-kid dancer named Frederick Thorncastle (John McCrea) who’s a contestant on a 1950’s TV show called Go Dancing! With his previous partner unavailable, he picks local girl Brenda Palmer (Ruby-May Martinwood) as her replacement even though Brenda is not only untrained as a dancer, she’s also African-British. Thorncastle is nearly killed when one of the TV lights unexpectedly falls down on the “X” that marked the spot where he was supposed to stand. Fortunately, he’d moved away from the lethal location just a few seconds before, so it’s just a case of attempted murder. Father Brown investigates and finds out a number of dark secrets, including Thorncastle’s ways of getting ahead in the Go Dancing! contest through underhanded means. Not only is he the grandson of the legendary “Dancing Duchess,” he’s also discovered that the show’s producer, August Bestwick (David Westhead), is Gay. He found this out when he followed Bestwick to the local Gay bar, which since this is the 1950’s and Gay sex is still illegal in Britain (as it was throughout the U.S. until 1961, when Illinois did a major revision of its criminal code and inadvertently left out the anti-sodomy law in the process), gives him the chance to blackmail the poor man. Father Brown deduces this from the matchbooks given out at the bar, which unlike most matchbooks has the establishment’s logo printed inside the matchbook rather than outside. Of course, being the hero of a 2020’s TV show, Father Brown is far more understanding and sympathetic to Bestwick’s sexuality than a real priest would have been in the 1950’s, or even now.

There’s a red-herring suspect named Ron White (Dan Hammill), who was an ex-con who reformed when he discovered ballroom dancing and decided to go straight, but the true culprit turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Melody Byers (Laura Pigott), who along with her husband Colin (Christopher Jeffers) is a Go Dancing! contestant. Her motive is that for some reason she blames Thorncastle for the death of her brother, who was also her former dance partner (shades of Fred and Adele Astaire!), who fell during a dance, became paralyzed, and she dropped out of the dancing circuit to be his caregiver until he died two years later from kidney failure. Thorncastle insists it was her fault for insisting on doing a lift they hadn’t adequately practiced, but it turns out Thorncastle was responsible because he hadn’t sanded down Melody’s brother’s shoes, apparently a common practice in ballroom dancing to give you more traction on the floor. There’s a clever ending in which Father Brown realizes from Melody’s confession that she’s set another booby trap for Thorncastle, even though in order to save Thorncastle’s life he has to walk onto the Go Dancing! set in the middle of a live telecast and shove him out of the way. In the end Melody is promised leniency and Thorncastle gets his at the hands of the Dancing Duchess herself (Angela Rippon), who makes a deus ex machina entrance at the end and announces that she’s so appalled at his tactics to win the contest that she’s disowning him and forcing him to go work for a living like everyone else. This Father Brown episode had real charm and made logical sense, and it was nice to see a member of the hereditary aristocracy “get his” in the end, as just happened to the real-life ex-Prince Andrew in Britain and isn’t happening in the U.S., where Donald Trump has effectively given himself Presidential immunity.