Father Brown: "The Sands of Time" (BBC Studios, Britbox, PBS, 2023)

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

Two nights ago (Saturday, November 18) I watched a Father Brown episode on PBS called “The Sands of Time,” and then a 1949 RKO “B” film noir called Strange Bargain. “The Sands of Time,” written by Neil Irvine and directed by Dominic Keavey, was an unusually good Father Brown episode full of emotional complexities. It begins with a rather dotty old Englishman named Oswald Hartigan (Bob Barrett) preparing to unveil the crown jewel of his private clock collection, an ultra-rare gold clock made for the royal family of Poland. Oswald is angrily confronted by his nephew, Lord Quentin Hartigan (Jesse Fox), who accuses him of squandering the family fortune on collectible clocks instead of allowing him to inherit it. Quentin demands money from Oswald and angrily stalks out when he doesn’t get it. From this opening I was expecting to see Oswald get murdered and Quentin unjustly suspected of the crime, but instead Irvine threw us a curveball and had Quentin be the murder victim. What’s more, he’s killed by being clubbed with the incredibly expensive clock, which subsequently disappears when Oswald stages his grand “unveiling” and there’s an ordinary vase under the curtain instead of the super-clock. It turns out that Oswald wrote Quentin a check before Quentin died – though no one can find it – and, though Oswald had just married his maid Betty (Jasmyn Banks), he wasn’t actually sleeping with her and she’d allowed herself to be seduced and impregnated by Quentin. The reason Oswald wasn’t sleeping with Betty was that he was actually Gay; he’d had an affair with a fellow soldier named Stan Hoskens (Stephen Kennedy, who looks in the role like a bizarre attempt to cross-breed Woody Allen and Bill Barr), and Stan has just come back into his life. It turns out that Quentin caught Oswald and Stan embracing, realized what their relationship actually was, and blackmailed Oswald into paying him off.

Stan gets arrested for the murder by the usual stupid official cop, Chief Inspector Sullivan (Tom Chambers), though the killer turns out to be Betty Hartigan, who walloped Quentin with the clock after he tried to rape her. There’s also a young man named Jake Hunt (Rowan Polonski), who took a false name (his real one was long and Polish) to get a job on Oswald Hartigan’s household staff. He’s also romancing Brenda Palmer (Ruby-May Martinwood), a young African-British woman who’s on the household staffs of both Oswald Hartigan and Father Brown, and though their relationship was off-and-on he manages to get Brenda to quit both her jobs and agree to relocate to London with him. Oswald Hartigan has acknowledged Jake as the rightful owner of the collector clock (ya remember the clock?) because he was the heir of the Polish family who owned the clock until the Nazis conquered Poland at the start of World War II and looted it along with plenty of other Polish art treasures, and Jake gave Brenda a tearful explanation of how the clock was near and dear to him because it was all he had left of his family. Only Jake plans to finance his new life in London by selling the clock at auction, and Brenda is so furious with him over his mercenary attitude towards it she breaks off with him and, in a quite exciting suspense climax well directed by Keavey, literally leaps off the train as it’s gathering speed on its way out of the station and back into the waiting arms of Father Brown and his housekeeper (and Brenda’s boss) Mrs. Devine (Claudia Blakely). And though it’s pretty anachronistic, I also liked the equanimity with which Father Brown accepts that Oswald Hartigan is Gay and Stan Hoskens his partner, though it’s hard to believe that a Roman Catholic priest in the 1950’s would be that Queer-friendly!