Sister Boniface Mysteries: "Stiff Competition" (BBC-TV, Britbox, PBS, 2023)

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

Two nights ago (Saturday, August 17) I watched a couple of shows on KPBS, the local (San Diego) public broadcasting station – a really pretentious documentary called The Seven Ages of Elvis, produced by Sky TV (one of Rupert Murdoch’s companies) in Britain; and, before that, a BBC-TV episode of one of their typically charming British-countryside based mystery dramas, Sister Boniface Mysteries. The episode was called “Stiff Competition” and the principal victim is a middle-aged magician named “The Great Fantini,” though his birth name is Terry Smith (Nigel Boyle). Sister Boniface (Lorna Watson), who seems to have heard of forensics well before anyone else in the British police, watches The Great Fantini at the annual Great Slaughter Talent Show contest rehearse his death-defying “Box of Death” trick. The idea is that a rope and pulley that work automatically will lower a metal box with spikes on each of its rails, and unless he works free from his bondage in time the spikes will stab him to death. As things turn out, the “Box of Death” descends quite a bit more quickly than it was supposed to, and Terry a.k.a. “Fantini” does die ahead of schedule. Sister Boniface, aided by her examination of Fantini’s equipment arranged for her by assistant local police detective, deduces that the rope through which a candle was supposed to burn and set off the trick had been sprayed with hair spray to make it burn faster. But who sabotaged it? Sister Boniface and her contact with the official local police, African-British detective Felix Livingstone (Jerry Iwu) – who’s filling in for her regular one, Sam Gillespie (Max Brown), because he’s off working some sort of undercover case – after the main case was solved he turned up with some sort of explanation for where he’d been and what he was doing, but I couldn’t recall what it was – cycle through a round of logical suspects.

They include Judge Jane Beaufort (Antonia Kinlay), who was being blackmailed by Fantini because years before she’d been his on-stage assistant and had used the name “Debra Cadabra”; Sylvie Simmons (Amy Forrest), mother of 11-year-old singing star Tina Tiny (Georgia Conlan – any relation?), who was Fantini’s principal rival for the talent show’s grand prize; and Leonard Monk (John Thomson), a.k.a. clown “Curly Cuddles,” another potential rival of Fantini’s for the prize. Sister Boniface, who in this show appears to be the only person in British law enforcement (official or otherwise) who’s ever heard of forensics, catches a whiff of hairspray in the rope that was supposed to release the cage of doom but was sabotaged to release it sooner than planned. From this she figures out that the killer is [spoiler alert!] Tina Tiny herself. It seems that she wasn’t an 11-year-old singing sensation after all; the real Tina died earlier and mom Sylvia had her older sister, 14-year-old Angela, impersonate her. Fantini caught her when she was unwrapping her breasts – like the real Judy Garland, who was 16 when she made The Wizard of Oz but had to have her breasts bound (quite painfully) to play the 12-year-old Dorothy Gale, she had to have her genuine womanhood mashed down to play a pre-pubescent girl – and threatened to blow her cover unless she withdrew from the contest and let him win. The talent show goes on and, with both his principal rivals hors de combat (one dead and the other in prison for murdering him), Leonard Monk wins. Then someone makes an offhanded comment to Sister Boniface that she ought to enter the talent contest herself next year, and though she begs off on the ground that competing would mean exhibiting the sin of pride, there’s a charming sequence at the end. Either it’s a fantasy or a representation of an actual contest entry, but whichever, the show ends with Sister Boniface herself in full nun’s gear singing a song about the joys of forensics to a tune from one of the Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. It’s by far the most entertaining bit in this show, which was overall charming but not as good as some of the other Sister Boniface Mysteries I’ve seen, even though the series’ creator, Jude Tindall, wrote the script herself.