Foyle's War: "The German Woman" (Greenlit Productions, ITV, Acorn, American Public Television, PBS, 2002)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, August 8) at 10 p.m. I watched “The German Woman,” the premiere episode from 2002 of a British TV series called Foyle’s War. It’s set during World War II (hence the title; “The German Woman” takes place in May 1940, while the Battle of Britain is still going on) and the lead character is Detective Chief Superintendent Christopher Foyle (Michael Kitchen in a nicely droll performance) of the British police in Hastings, Sussex, who at the start of this episode is having a long-running battle with his immediate superior. It seems that Foyle wants a more active role supporting the British war effort and his boss doesn’t want to give him one because the police department is short-handed enough as it is since so many younger officers either have enlisted voluntarily or been drafted. “The German Woman” deals with Greta Beaumont (Joanna Kanska), who’s really not from Germany – she’s a Sudeten refugee from Czechoslovakia who fled to Britain two months before Adolf Hitler and Neville Chamberlain cut their infamous 1938 deal at Munich which basically handed first the Sudetenland and then the whole of Czechoslovakia to the Nazis. She’s become the second wife of local aristocrat Harry Beaumont (Robert Hardy, whose career remains one of the most mysterious might-have-beens of cinematic history; after a brilliant performance as Prince Hal, later Henry V, in the 1960 BBC-TV miniseries An Age of Kings based on Shakespeare’s history plays, he faded from sight while Sean Connery, who played Hotspur, went on to play James Bond and become an international superstar), who’s pulled strings to get her exempted from the British Home Office’s decree that people of German ancestry were not allowed to live on the British coast. Greta’s ability to evade this restriction, including getting a local doctor to fake a diagnosis of her having a heart condition when she really didn’t, has evoked a lot of resentment among the British townspeople that only ratchets up when a stray German bomber drops a bomb on the town and kills barmaid Tracey Stephens (Nancy Lodder).

Greta Beaumont was anxious to keep her stepdaughter Sarah (Rosamund Pike) from marrying attorney Michael Turner (Dominic Mafham), whom she met on a trip to London to settle affairs concerning the Beaumont estate. Michael, it turns out, was also carrying on a secret affair with Tracy Stephens even though she was underage (just 17) at the time. The show, directed by Jeremy Silberston and written by Anthony Horowitz (also co-creator of the much more engaging Midsomer Murders series), is very slow-going; it takes about half of the 100-minute running time for Greta to get murdered. The crime is committed by an assailant who strung a long piece of piano wire across two trees on the path on which Greta usually took her morning bicycle ride, which lets Foyle know that despite the sheer number of people in town who expressed hatred for Greta just because of her German origins, the killer had to be someone from her household who would know her routine. Along the way Foyle busts Bob Keegan (Robert Goodale), a corrupt civil servant who’s making illegal money offering to “lose” the draft notices of anyone whose family can pay him to keep their son out of the service, and later on there’s another murder victim: Ian Judd (Philip Whitchurch), who was blackmailing Michael Turner over the secret of his illegal affair with an underage woman. Eventually Michael turns out to be Greta’s murderer – not to anyone’s particular surprise, since his pattern of having sexual affairs with at least two women at once has already marked him as a rotter and Greta’s suspicions that he was only interested in Sarah to get his grubby little hands on the Beaumont family fortune turn out to be correct. Foyle’s War aired on the British commercial TV network ITV, formed in 1955 when the Conservative government then in power authorized it as a limited incursion into the BBC’s monopoly, and it was a popular enough show that when ITV’s then-head of programming Simon Shaps canceled it in 2007, five years into its run, pressure from fans forced ITV to reinstate it in 2008 and Shaps lost his job as a result. But it turned out to be an awfully sluggish and rather dull program, despite some interesting quirks – including the shock when Foyle requests a driver (since he doesn’t know how to drive) and a woman, Samantha “Sam” Stewart (Honeysuckle Weeks), is assigned to him; and his eventual hiring as his assistant disabled war veteran Paul Milner (Anthony Howell) – and though I’m glad it lasted as long as it did (five seasons in its first incarnation and three in its second), it’s not really all that interesting and it’s hard to believe it attracted the fan attention and support it did.