Father Brown: "The Hermit of Hazelnut Cottage" (BBC Productions, Britbox, PBS, copyright 2023, released 2024)

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

On Saturday, October 5 I watched a Father Brown episode on PBS called “The Hermit of Hazelnut Cottage,” set in the early 1950’s with the aftermath of World War II very much a part of the plot. The titular hermit of Hazelnut Cottage is Dr. Angus McClurgy (Sylvester McCoy), who lost his wife during the war and ever since then has been living very much alone. During the war he took in a war orphan, an African-British girl named Brenda Palmer (Paris Froggatt), only to send her away again and dump her into a county orphanage for reasons he never bothered to explain. All this is shown in a flashback sequence shot in sepia; when we return to full color Brenda is a young woman (played by Ruby-May Martinwood, and the two are totally convincing as the same person at different ages) and she’s just received a letter, ostensibly from Dr. McClurgy, saying he’s on the point of death and would like to see her again before he croaks. Only he didn’t write the letter himself: his caregiver wrote it and sent it to Brenda. By chance, Brenda is working in Father Brown’s church and he organizes a trip to Hazelnut Cottage to reunite her with Dr. McClurgy, who’s in the midst of a nasty battle with the local landowner, St. John Sprockett (Owen Brenman), and a London developer he’s hired named Edward Wainbody (Nick Blakeley) to tear down all the cottages on his property and replace them with a brand spanking-new development. Only Dr. McClurgy doesn’t want to sell the cottage, and without his consent Sprockett and Wainbody decided to move the development over and build it on the local meadow.

This freaks out a lot of the locals, including Susan Payne (Jasmine Bayes), a young Asian-looking woman who was settled in the region at the same time as Brenda was, who’s become a staff artist for a British government agency documenting rare plants, flowers and birds. She’s upset that the development would mean destroying rare habitats and threatening the survival of several species, and Wainbody – the sort of character in mystery fiction who’s especially good at making himself hated and giving lots of people reasons to want him dead – snippily says, “They can just fly away.” Ultimately Wainbody is found dead, buried in a shallow grave. A subplot develops concerning a German flyer who was shot down over the area during World War II and Dotty Finglesham (Melanie Walters), a local woman who lost her own husband when he was shot down over Germany during World War I. The German, Friedrich von Bach (Aron von Adrian), got stuck in a tree with his parachute after he bailed out of his plane, and Dotty cut him down, hid him in her house, and tied him to her bed so he couldn’t escape. Since he’d also suffered a wound in his foot, she got Dr. McClurgy to treat him, only Susan stumbled upon him, untied him and, to Dotty’s horror, he escaped and had some nasty things to say about her husband and what would happen to all the Brits when Germany finally won the war. A furious Dotty clubbed him to death from behind and buried him in a grave she dug in the meadow, and that’s where things rested until Wainbody announced that they were going to build their new development on the meadow and Dotty freaked out, worried that the German pilot’s remains would be discovered and she’d be linked to his death. So she clubbed Wainbody and buried him on top of Friedrich in the same grave. It all ends relatively happily, with Dr. McClurgy finally seeing the point after Brenda and Father Brown’s factota Mrs. Devine (Claudie Blakely) get him to realize that the accumulated dust and mold is only making his various illnesses worse, and if he gets a new cottage out of the deal he’ll be better off, so he agrees to sell to Lord Sprockett and the new developer Sprockett brings in (whom we never meet).