Father Brown: "The Star of Jacob" (BBC Studios, BBC Worldwide, Albert+ Sustainable, originally aired December 23, 2016)

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

Last night (Saturday, June 17) at 8 I watched an intriguing Father Brown rerun on KPBS from relatively early in the show’s run: “The Star of Jacob,” the Christmas-themed episode from the fifth season, originally telecast in Britain on December 23, 2016. This show definitively establishes that Father Brown was a Roman Catholic (though given the early-1950’s time setting of the show, definitely pre-Vatican II, it’s a surprise that Father Brown leads the Christmas service in English instead of Latin!) – for some reason I thought for a while that he was Episcopalian – and the early-1950’s time frame is established by, among other things, a reference to one of the young men in the dramatis personae currently serving in the Korean War. The show’s plot deals with an impending visit by the Duke of Frome, John Langton (Raymond Coulthard), his wife Diana (Zannah Hodson) and their baby son Jacob (played by identical twins Cooper and Austin Curtis, a common dodge to get around legal limits on how long babies are allowed to work), and the hard time Father Brown is getting from church leader Canon Damian Fox (Roger May) that everything has to be just right for the Christmas service. There has to be a real manger, a real donkey and sheep for Joseph, Mary and the baby Jesus to ride in on, and a professional-quality choir instead of the usual rag-tag batch of amateurs who have sung the Christmas services in Christmases past. The intrigue begins when the baby is apparently kidnapped, and though he has to deal with an even nastier than usual representative of official law enforcement, Father Brown eventually realizes that the baby was in fact the offspring of two of the Duke’s servants, Hannah Parkin (Maddy Hill) and her husband George (Elliot Jordan). They were legally married but had to conceal that from the Duke because he’d have fired both of them if he’d known they were a couple. Because of the secrecy surrounding their marriage, Hannah Parkin had to give birth to her son in a home for unwed mothers, and Duchess Diana found herself there as well when complications developed that her regular doctors couldn’t handle.

Alas, Diana’s baby was born sickly and died shortly thereafter, and, assuming that Hannah was just going to put her baby up for adoption anyway, Diana and her husband decided to claim Hannah’s baby as their own. Father Brown deduces the truth when he realizes that, though a ladder had been left outside the baby’s bedroom window to make it look like the kidnapper had come in from outside, the soil under the ladder was too wet to support the ladder itself, a person using it and a baby being carried. So he realizes that the baby was actually taken from inside by someone who knew the household’s routine well enough to know that, among other things, the baby’s bedroom window was not locked. When the truth comes out, the Duke admits it and relinquishes control of the baby to his actual parents; he also offers to find them a cottage on his estate where they can live together as an out-front couple and still work for him. There’s a deus ex machina ending I could have lived without in that Diana finds herself pregnant again despite having been told by the doctors at the laying-in hospital that her birth had been so difficult she could never conceive again, but aside from that glitch I found this a surprisingly moving episode once writer Jude Tindall got the unnecessary complications out of the way. The Christmas service itself turns into yet another ramshackle we’re-doing-the-best-we-can effort, with half the choir (including the tenor soloist) coming down with laryngitis and the animals wandering off and having to be tracked down again. There’s also a charmingly scapegrace character named Basil Urquhart (Christos Lawton, easily the hottest guy in the cast!), who’s briefly suspected of the kidnapping because he’d be the next in line for the dukedom if John and Diana Langton die childless – though he’s well aware that he isn’t sufficiently mature to live up to the responsibilities of being a duke and he couldn’t be less interested in the succession. There’s also a homeless man named Michael Negal (Dean Andrews) in the cast, though his main function seems to be to bully the local saloon owner, Mrs. McCarthy (Sorcha Cusack). Despite a slow beginning, this Father Brown episode was a real charmer, and as always on this show it’s made special by the great acting of Mark Williams as Father Brown.