Colonel March of Scotland Yard: The Case of the Lively Ghost (Tony Wright Season)
Right back to the 1950s for this first post of Tony Wright Season.
Colonel March of Scotland Yard is actually a show that has appeared on this blog’s predecessor nearly a decade ago, but isn’t a show with which I’m very familiar. It is a series of mysteries based on a fictional detective created by writer John Dickson Carr, which often featured locked room or other impossible mysteries, although I see that some episodes were written by others. Colonel March is of course played by Boris Karloff, and he takes the role as an opportunity to be utterly urbane and charming: there isn’t the slightest hint of the horror film here! March runs a special department of Scotland Yard (which was called in the original story The Department of Queer Complaints) dealing with anything out of the ordinary run of police work.
In this episode Colonel March is invited by an acquaintance who is a fake medium to investigate the reappearance in her fake seances of a deceased man. It is very much in the vein of the classic story where a fake medium suddenly finds that the dead really are contacting her and gets freaked out. i see from the reviews online that one of the most popular things about this episode is the depiction of the tricks used by fake mediums and all the technical details. It’s also interesting that Colonel March is obviously good friends with a fake medium and apparently does nothing about this fraud! It’s not a criticism because this is the way the writer decided to take it, but it’s very strange watching a Scotland Yard detective at an obviously fraudulent event investigating the apparently dead person rather than the person committing the fraud!
The dead man who has suddenly resurfaced in the seance has a brother and Tony Wright plays both brothers (one with a moustache). I’m a bit disorientated by this fact because of having recently posted about the episode of Thriller where Ian Hendry played twins. Other characters helpfully comment that both brothers are indeed very alike, which is of course because they’re played by the same man. Once again I would question the criticism that you often find about Tony Wright, that he couldn’t act, because he makes a perfectly competent job of it here. Frankly, given the very colourful nature of the plot, him simply getting on with the role is exactly what is needed because there’s enough drama elsewhere to be getting on with. Of course Boris Karloff is always a larger than life character and there isn’t that much room for anyone else. He in’t a sexy piece at all, doesn’t get his kit off, and does a perfectly serviceable job of his role, so I’m less convinced than ever by the claims that he couldn’t act.
I do have one criticism of the plot, which is that my opinion is that a fraudulent medium, faced with a dead person apparently appearing at her seance, would naturally assume that someone else was being fraudulent as well rather than going to the police about it!
I’m not going to give away what happens in case you want to watch this, which I definitely think you should.
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