by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last Saturday, July 16
I put on the latest episode
of the Father Brown British
detective series to be rerun on KPBS, “Sins of the Father” (originally aired in
the U.K. January 14, 2016), in which aircraft manufacturer Robert Twyman
(Robert Daws) receives a series of blackmail notes telling him to “confess” —
though just what he is supposed to confess
to is left powerfully ambiguous until close to the end — or his son will be
killed. His son Calvin (Oscar Dunbar) is an amateur pianist who’s interested in
going after a professional career and who arrogantly insists he doesn’t need to
rehearse for the upcoming amateur show in town — an annual event at which
journalist-turned-aspiring pianist Rosie Everton (Amy Noble) is also supposed
to play. The town is both enthralled and upset by the visit of a well-known
author and lecturer on Freudian theory, Dr. Mordaunt Jackson (Paul Bown), who
in an early sequence manages to hypnotize amateur singer Mrs. McCarthy (Sorcha
Cusack) into being unable to perform in public. The show is maddeningly
uncertain about when it’s
supposed to be taking place: the attitudes of the characters and some of the
dialogue are contemporary but the cars and clothes mark it as the 1950’s. The
lead “sleuth” character, Father Brown (Mark Williams), hears Robert Twyman’s
generalized confession but doesn’t get the specifics about just what Twyman is
supposed to have done. Calvin Twyman is found strangled to death in a room that
was locked from the inside and to which only Robert and Calvin Twyman and their
butler, former aircraft engineer Lester Wallace (Dean Williamson), had the key.
Later Rosie Everton is also strangled, and Father Brown — with virtually no
help from local law enforcement — deduces that Dr. Mordaunt Jackson is the
killer: he committed the murders remotely through hypnosis, putting Robert
Twyman under a psychological compulsion to strangle to death the nearest person
whenever he heard the Chopin Nocturne No. 1 in B-flat minor, Op. 9, no. 1 and
then sending his son Calvin a copy of the score and suggesting it be his piece
at the concert, so Calvin would practice it and his dad would go ballistic and
kill him — only after murdering his son and then forgetting that he had done so
(which was also part of the hypnotic spell) Robert also knocked off Rosie
Egerton when, while they were in the same room, she noticed the music for the Chopin
Nocturne on a piano and started to play it. Dr. Jackson’s motive is that Rosie,
a former journalist who had quit a big-city newspaper to become a concert
pianist — but was still working for a local paper to make a living and keep her
hand in — was about to publish a story about him selling airplanes with
defective parts, and Dr. Jackson’s son had lost his life in a crash of a Twyman plane caused by the
defective part. (All My Sons meets The Manchurian Candidate.) It’s a charming show, mainly due to the lovely performance by Mark
Williams as Father Brown, even though some of the episodes have strained credibility
and this one sails over the top.
