Father Brown: "The Wheels of Wrath" (Britbox, BBC, PBS, 2023)

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

My husband Charles and I got back at quarter to 8 following a ride across the bay on the Coronado Ferry and then from downtown to North Park on the #215 bus, and we got back in time to watch a couple of shows on KPBS. One was a quite charming Father Brown episode called “The Wheels of Wrath,” written by Matthew Cooke and Vncent Lund and directed by Domnic Keavey. The titular “wheels of wrath” are a motorcycle gang, the “Tonne Ups,” led by Billy Turner (Jamie Bacon, whose James Dean-like icon of cool manner is just right for the part even though the world isn’t exactly panting for James Dean “types” in 2023) who have come to Father Brown’s peaceful village of Kembleford and are running their bikes at all hours of the night. The non-biker residents are pleading with Father Brown and the local police sergeant, Goodfellow (John Burton), to arrest them for something just to get rid of them, but both the cop and the padre explain that as long as they don’t actually break any laws, there’s nothing they can do against them. Among the activities of the bikers are so-called “record races,” in which the gang starts a song playing on the jukebox of the local coffee shop, owned by Denny Beaton (Trevor Cooper), then one member gets on a motorcycle and sees if he can arrive back at the coffee shop before the song ends. Billy Turner prepares for one such “record race,” to the song “Sh-Boom” (the anemic white remake by the Crew-Cuts instead of the Black original by the Chords, by the way), only at the last minute he is replaced by Roger Norton (Joshua Griffin), the “sensitive” member of the Tonne Ups who seems genuinely remorseful about something, we’re not sure quite what. There’s also a local Black girl who’s bought herself a leather jacket and wants to go riding with the Tonne Ups even though they don’t accept women as members, and a white girl named Lisa Morris (Annie Cordoni) who has a mad crush on Billy Turner and wants to ride off with him even though her mother Agnes (Amy Cudden) is horrified by the idea.

Agnes has raised Lisa as a single parent and told her that her father died in combat in World War II, only at the very end of the show – after the killer is revealed – Agnes tells Lisa that she was the product of a one-night stand from a man quite like Billy Turner who ran off the morning after he impregnated her and she hasn’t seen or heard from him since. (“He may have died in the war,” she adds laconically.) The murder happens when Roger is impaled on a piece of barbed wire someone had strung across the road just an hour or two earlier, and his killer is [spoiler alert!] Denny Beaton, whose daughter was killed in a motorcycle accident while riding with Billy Turner when Billy was too drunk to drive properly. Denny set the trap intending to kill Billy out of revenge, but Roger was the one who got killed instead. Denny again tries to kill Billy by spreading oil across the road where Billy is going to ride in a race between his motorcycle and Father Brown in his old-style pedal-powered bicycle. Father Brown has a trick up his sleeve – a local farmer is doing something across the road with a tractor, leaving room enough for Father Brown to pass by on his bike but not Billy on his motorcycle. Brown gets ahead of Billy, spots the oil on the road, and waves down Billy to stop. At first Billy doesn’t want to because he suspects Father Brown is just trying to delay him to win the race, but eventually he does, he spots the oil slick after Brown points it out to him, and Denny is arrested, the bikers clear out of Kembleford, and somewhat to my surprise Billy is allowed to leave with them instead of (as I was expecting) being arrested for manslaughter in connection with Denny’s daughter’s death. Also Agnes, who had previously vandalized her own garden to frame the Tonne Ups and get the police either to arrest them or order them out of town, tells Lisa the truth about her heritage by way of explaining why she’s been so overprotective of Lisa. This Father Brown was a low-keyed episode that made the most of this show’s mid-1950’s time period and was a lot of fun in the quiet, relatively dignified way many British mysteries are.