Father Brown: "The Wrong Shape" (BBC Television, PBS, 2013)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two nights ago I watched an intriguing episode from the first season of the British TV series Father Brown, based on a character created by G. K. Chesterton -- a parish priest in a small North England town who helps the police solve particularly mysterious crimes whether they want him to or not, This episode was called “The Wrong Shape” and was directed by Dominic Keavey from a script by Nicola Wilson, with Rachel Flowerday and Tahsin Guner credited with adapting Chesterton’s character to TV. One thing about Father Brown is the time when it takes place -- the late 1940’s, just after World War Two -- not a particularly common setting for these types of stories (they’re usually contemporary or flash back to the 1920’s or 1930’s), and another thing of interest is the rather dotty performance of Mark Williams as Father Brown and how he captures the character’s duality: on the surface he’s a depressingly normal and seemingly not very bright Anglican priest (I don’t think they actually specified his denomination but he’s drawn as so ordinary he almost has to be with the established church) but with a keen strength and intelligence between the rather bumbling exterior.

This story is about Leonard Quinton (Robert Cavanah), a rather irascible country squire and amateur poet (he's had a book published but we get the impression he paid for it himself) who -- we learn well into the episode -- walked out on a prestigious career as a doctor on Harley Street in London (Harley Street is to medicine what Fleet Street is to journalism or New York’s Wall Street is to the financial markets) and settled to an eccentric existence after he returned from a trip to India (which is described in the script as the Raj -- indicating that this story takes place in the brief interregnum between the end of World War II in 1945 and Britain’s exit from India in 1947). When he went to India he brought home a large collection of Indian plants -- including some poisonous ones (recalling Leo Delibes’ opera Lakme, which as I once told my mother is sort of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, only instead of an American sailor it’s a British soldier; instead of Japan it’s India; and instead of just stabbing herself with a dagger the heroine, spurned by her foreign lover and socially ostracized, commits suicide by deliberately inhaling the fumes of a poisonous plant). He also brought home an Indian to tend them, Umesh Varna (Ramon Tikaram), whom we first see strolling Quinton’s grounds in a white robe and with shoulder-length hair -- and looking, like the real-life eden ahbez (composer of Nat “King” Cole’s 1947 hit “Nature Boy,” he dressed himself in robes, grew his hair long and insisted on taking his composer credit in all lower-case letters because he thought capitals should be reserved for God), like a hippie 20 years early.

Father Brown and a number of his friends are invited to attend a poetry reading at the Quinton home, including a poem by Quinton’s mistress Violet Parnassus (Jennie Jacques) which describes their sex life in lubricious detail., as well as a poem by Quinton himself that appears to celebrate death. Varna tells Quinton that he’s about to die, though he’s also busy with plans to turn Quinton’s barn into a meditation center (when one guest mistakenly calls it a “levitation center” it’s one of the funniest lines of the show). When Quinton is found hung by the roof of the nursery on his property the police instantly suspect suicide, but Father Brown deduces that Quinton was really murdered and the scene faked to look like suicide by a killer who wound the noose the way a right-handed person would do it -- Quinton was left-handed (though we’re just told that and it would have been nice if they’d established that visually by showing him writing, smoking or doing something with his left hand). One of the main suspects is Quinton’s wife Martha (a marvelous performance by Ruth Gemmell), who’s living on her husband’s property even though he’s estranged from her, he’s promised Violet he’ll divorce Martha and marry her, and the overall idea of a man having both his wife and his mistress on the same grounds is a bit hard to swallow.

Another suspect is Quinton’s attorney, Mr. Harris (Simon Thorp), whose main concern seems to be to make sure Quinton leaves enough money for Martha and doesn’t spend all his money on Varna’s schemes to promote Indian religion in Britain. Harris turns out to have been the murderer -- he strangled Quinton and dragged his body into the conservatory and strung it up -- but what he didn’t realize is that when he did this Quinton was already dead. He was still in anguish over the fact that back when they were living in London Martha had got pregnant -- at long last, after they’d waited long and hard for their first child following a series of miscarriages -- only to control the pain of her morning sickness Dr. Quinton obtained a newly invented drug from Germany, which I’m pretty sure was supposed to be thalidomide since the baby was born horribly deformed. We’re not told just what she looked like, but I once saw a woman whom I’m pretty sure was a thalidomide baby -- it was in 1983 at the Albertson’s on 33rd and El Cajon (now Pancho Villa’s) and she looked about 20, the right age since it was in 1962 that the thalidomide scandal broke worldwide and the drug was banned; she looked otherwise normal except her hands were attached straight to her shoulders without any arms between them.

Anyway, the Quintons never mentioned the birth of this daughter to their friends and quietly buried her in their own garden under a blank tombstone, and the shock of his daughter’s deformity and his own sense of responsibility for it led Quinton to give up his medical practice and move to the country -- and finally it turns out that he committed suicide after all, not by hanging himself but with a poisonous white sap from one of his Indian plants. (Before he did himself in with the stuff he tried it out on his old, sick cat -- and it worked.) I’ve generally liked the Father Brown mysteries and this was no exception: it was well done, with a provocative story premise and the kind of quiet, natural British acting U.K. players seem almost to be able to do in their sleep -- a far cry from the straining, heaving and sighing we’ve endured from three generations of American actors under the malign influence of the Actors’ Studio.