The Mysterious Case of Father Brown

For many years I've been fond of G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown books. Brown is quite different in feel to his pre-war contemporaries such as those in works by Christie and Allingham. This mild-mannered, sleuthing Catholic priest relies on his experience of human nature, while justice weighs heavier than a strict interpretation of the law. But a TV adaptation has highlighted a strange anachronism that turns up surprisingly often in detective series.

Since 2013, Father Brown has appeared in daytime TV programmes on the BBC, though the stories are largely detached from the originals, in part because the series was moved to a postwar Cotswolds village, and, as often is the case with TV versions of literary detectives, other regular characters were added to the cast. The move to a fixed village location is useful to establish those regular characters, but it throws up the worst version I've ever seen of an incoherent anachronistic setting.

Period dramas like this - even cheapish daytime ones - often go to significant lengths to ensure that details of the setting are accurate. So, for example, a recent episode featured a copy of the Asimov book Second Foundation. Father Brown uses this to roughly fix a date, as the book 'only came out last year' - which would fit with the circa 1954 setting. Yet there is one glaring oddity.

A weaker example of this occurs quite often when dramas, especially murder mysteries, feature a church. For arts sake, the production people like to use old church buildings, yet for reasons of plot or simply to provide more dramatic fixtures and fittings (the inevitable confessional, for example), the buildings are decked out as Catholic churches. To put a Catholic church into a medieval English building would be like claiming that a first edition of John Donne came out in 1953. It's ignoring all of history since the Reformation - with the odd exception, we simply don't have ancient churches in this country that are used by a Catholic parish.

In the Father Brown series, though, things are taken a step further - not only does Brown have an ancient village church, but pretty well everyone in the village is a Catholic. It's mindbogglingly dissonant with reality, a timeslip from the sixteenth century. Still, the bread bin looks right for 1954, so that's okay.

See all of Brian's online articles or subscribe to them for free here.

Comments

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's 2010 gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some exp

Is 5x3 the same as 3x5?

The Internet has gone mildly bonkers over a child in America who was marked down in a test because when asked to work out 5x3 by repeated addition he/she used 5+5+5 instead of 3+3+3+3+3. Those who support the teacher say that 5x3 means 'five lots of 3' where the complainants say that 'times' is commutative (reversible) so the distinction is meaningless as 5x3 and 3x5 are indistinguishable. It's certainly true that not all mathematical operations are commutative. I think we are all comfortable that 5-3 is not the same as 3-5. However. This not true of multiplication (of numbers). And so if there is to be any distinction, it has to be in the use of English to interpret the 'x' sign. Unfortunately, even here there is no logical way of coming up with a definitive answer. I suspect most primary school teachers would expands 'times' as 'lots of' as mentioned above. So we get 5 x 3 as '5 lots of 3'. Unfortunately that only wor

Why backgammon is a better game than chess

I freely admit that chess, for those who enjoy it, is a wonderful game, but I honestly believe that as a game , backgammon is better (and this isn't just because I'm a lot better at playing backgammon than chess). Having relatively recently written a book on game theory, I have given quite a lot of thought to the nature of games, and from that I'd say that chess has two significant weaknesses compared with backgammon. One is the lack of randomness. Because backgammon includes the roll of the dice, it introduces a random factor into the play. Of course, a game that is totally random provides very little enjoyment. Tossing a coin isn't at all entertaining. But the clever thing about backgammon is that the randomness is contributory without dominating - there is still plenty of room for skill (apart from very flukey dice throws, I can always be beaten by a really good backgammon player), but the introduction of a random factor makes it more life-like, with more of a sense

Search This Blog