Sister Boniface Mysteries: "Dead Air" (BBC-TV, BritBox, PBS, 2023)

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

Last night (Saturday, August 24) I watched an engaging episode of the British TV series Sister Boniface Mysteries, an offshoot of G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown series. Both series are set in central England, in the fictional town of “Great Slaughter,” though while Father Brown takes place in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s (one episode announces the accession of Queen Elizabeth II, which took place in 1952 while her coronation was a year later – and her son, King Charles, similarly had to wait a year between his becoming king and his formal coronation), Sister Boniface Mysteries takes place in the 1960’s. This particular episode was called “Dead Air,” and dealt with an illegal “pirate” radio station called “Radio Catherine,” obviously based on the real-life Radio Caroline. The real Radio Caroline offered British listeners American-style rock ‘n’ roll programming, including fast-talking D.J.’s who frequently talked over the beginnings or endings of songs (when I worked at college radio in 1977 promotional singles would frequently carry notations on their labels as to how long the instrumental openings and closings of the songs were so D.J.’s would know how long they could talk over them before the actual vocals began) and paid-for commercials. The stations generally evaded the laws making them illegal by broadcasting from ships permanently anchored more than 12 miles off the British coast, thereby technically achieving legal status because they were broadcasting from international waters. They were finally put out of business by a 1967 Act of Parliament that made it illegal for British companies to advertise on them or British citizens to support them in any way – though Radio Caroline hung on, won an official British broadcasting license in 2017 and still exists today.

“Dead Air” begins with a prologue showing the popularity of “Radio Catherine” and the number of listeners it’s reaching, not only in terms of audience size but the wide variety of class backgrounds they’re from, in an era in which British society was still highly class-stratified. (I remember an anecdote told by the Beatles’ record producer, George Martin, in which Eddie Fisher, then serving in the U.S. Army under a Special Services arrangement that allowed him to continue his career largely uninterrupted, came to Abbey Road Studio in London to record – and was told that, since he was only a private, he’d have to use the servants’ entrance.) Radio Catherine is mainly staffed by four people: Billy King (Thomas Flynn), their star D.J. and founder; his wife, Catherine “Cathy” Bright (Ellen Francis), after whom the station was named; Patt Garrett (Karl Theobald), another D.J. who’s hopelessly in love with Cathy; and the station’s engineer, Nigel Greybone (Sean McKenzie), who’s considerably older than the others. The Great Slaughter police chief, Sam Gillespie (Max Brown), is contending with a visiting officer named Greg (Mark Rainsbury), who’s old and hard of hearing but is determined to bust Radio Catherine at all costs despite Sam’s protestations that he wants to bust real criminals whose crimes involve real harm to real victims instead of putting out of business a radio station that, though technically illegal, isn’t hurting anybody.

The plot kicks off when Billy King is electrocuted in the middle of doing his radio show just after a fiasco in which the cops traced what they thought was the secret location of Radio Catherine’s transmitter (unlike the real Radio Caroline, Radio Catherine is land-based until the very end of the program), only the station got wind of what was going on and moved their equipment, leaving an insulting note behind. Sister Boniface, who as I noted during previous comments on this show seems to be the only person connected to British law enforcement in the 1960’s who’d heard of forensics, is able to figure out whodunit based on an audio analysis of the tape of Billy’s last show. Though most of what was heard on the tape was the last song Billy was playing when he grabbed the “hot” mike and met his end, Billy had left the in-studio mike on when he went to open the studio door to let in the man who turned out to be his killer. Sister Boniface hears a sound in the background of the music and deduces it was the killer’s hearing aid, and therefore Greg was the killer. His motive was that he was actually Cathy’s father, and he’d never forgiven Billy for running off with his daughter three years ago, marrying her and starting a pirate radio station named after her. Ironically, Billy’s and Cathy’s relationship had gone sour over the three years they’d been together, and the only reason they hadn’t broken up was because they felt they needed to stay together to keep Radio Catherine going. In the end Greg is arrested for Billy’s murder and Cathy and Patt Garrett end up together, while the station keeps going via an outside investor named Gabriel Viegas (Tibu Fortes), who’s offered to buy them a ship they can broadcast from, just like the real-life Radio Caroline. There’s also one of the show’s trademark fantasy sequences, which features Sister Boniface (Lorna Watson, impeccably cast as the title character) imagining herself as a Radio Catherine D.J. hosting a show. “Dead Air” was a charming episode of Sister Boniface Mysteries, though a little draggy in the middle as the really interesting part of the show – the doings and misdoings among the Radio Catherine staff both before and after Billy’s murder – take a regrettable back seat to the inevitable working-out of the mystery.