Sister Boniface Mysteries: "Scoop!" (Britbox, BBC, PBS, 20220

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

Last night (February 11) I did a mini-binge of three TV shows on three different networks, starting with a typically engaging Sister Boniface Mysteries episode called “Scoop!,”dealing with a ferociously ambitious woman reporter, Adele Kennedy, who has hired on as a maid at the home of Charles Streatham (Raymond Coulthard), who’s already the Minister of Defence (as they spell it in Britain) and is next in line to be Prime Minister. Charles Streatham is leading a campaign to restore traditional family val9ues to Britain, and oif course anybody who’s seen more than about six movies or TV shows in the last 50 years knows what that means, It means he’s having an extra-relational affair with his 22-year-old secretary, Mary Sparkes (Phoebe Sparrow), which he’s carrying on even at home with his wife Nancy (Georgina Rich) on the premises. Of course Nancy is having an extra-relational fling of her own with playwright Anthony Kelly (Jo Stone-Fewings). When Mary is found dead at the foot of a staircase on the Streathams’ country estate, the police, led by detectives Sam Gillespie (Max Brown) and Felix Livingstone (Jerry Iwu), show up and investigate. Sister Boniface (Lorna Watson), who under the premises of this show appears to be the only person in Britain who knows anything about forensics, is called in as a consultant and she determines that Mary Sparkes was already dead, or nearly so, when she fell down the stairs.

What killed her was a secret nerve toxin invented by the KGB’s researchers, consisting of two chemicals,each of which is harmless in itself but together they combine to make a deadly poison. One portion of the poison was administered to Mary in a bottle of spiked “Fervor” perfume – it’s established that it’s the most expensive perfume in the world and Audrey Hepburn uses it – while the other component was given to Mary in the form of a spiked Belgravia brand cigarette. Sister Boniface makes a rare boo-boo when she tells the cops to collect the cigarettes smoked by the males at the house but tells them not to bother with the ones smoked by women because a woman’s cigarette would have had lipstick traces on it and the cigarette that contained the poison did not. Eventually the killer turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Anthony Kelly’s actress wife Jocelyn,who had a brief fling at movie stardom only to burn out when she became too difficult to work with, and who engaged in such prima donna antics as physically fighting with Elizabeth Tayloir on the set of Cleopatra. In the story’s presence Jocelyn Kelly is being considered for the lead role of Sister Maria von Trapp in The Sound of Music, and she pounces on the presence of a real nun on the estate and asks her for the loan of her habit (and, not surprisingly, director Paul Gibson and writer Dan Murthen go big-time for the irony of a woman dressed as a nun throwing herself big-time at the various men in the cast!) and also pumps her for information on how to be credible as a nun.

She even drafts Detective Gillespie to run lines with her, with Gillespie taking Captain Von Trapp’s role, and for the rest of the show she addresses him as “Captain” even though Anthony Kelly takes him aside and tells him that Julie Andrews has the part sewn up and Jocelyn is only getting the formality of an audition because the director owes him a favor. It turns out Jocelyn smokes Belgravia cigarettes but she didn’t leave a lipstick trace because she smoked them from a holder. It also turns out that Jocelyn was recruited by the KGB when Anthony was invited to Moscow for a six-month stay when one of his plays was produced there. The MacGuffin is a secret document in which a formula for an all-important bit of British nuclear research is concealed in a microdot, and Jocelyn has stolen the document and hidden it in a book in the Streatham family library. But which one? Eventually a woman detective on the scene deduces that Jocelyn hid the document in a copy of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women because Jocelyn starred in a remake of that story and it was the only film she ever made in which she did not appear in the nude. In the end, Jocelyn s arrested for espionage and murder, Charles Streatham is allowed to resign quietly over his mishandling of a classified document (sound familiar?), and our intrepid reporter (who is so forgotten indb.com doesn’t list the actress who played her, even though she’s one of the best things in the movie) has to go along with the official line and hope for another scoop later in her career. Like all the Sister Boniface Mysteries I’ve seen so far, this is a quite charming tale even though its plot elemnts include not only murder but espionage, skulduggery and adultery.