Total and Complete Travesty

[jsburbidge]

 I have just finished watching two episodes of the BBC Father Brown.

There is nothing good to say of it. To proceed from most fundamental to less so:

1. The scriptwriters show no signs of having read Chesterton.
2. The plots are unrecognizable.
3. There is no Chestertonian paradox; none of Chesterton's style; no theology.
4. Where is Flambeau?
5. Why is an RC priest shown in a chasuble, about to celebrate a nuptial mass in the 1950s, without a biretta?
6. Why is a RC priest shown wearing a surplice and black scarf?
7. He is neither short enough nor plump enough. 

ETA: Also, he didn't pick locks, and would not have said things like "Let's get down to this".

Comments

[graydon]

Chesterton was a very complex mix of horrible axioms and insight. It'd be a lot to expect a modern script writing team to have an understand of the mix.

I do think getting the vestments correct would be a reasonable expectation, though.

[jsburbidge]

It's essentially Miss Marple in a cassock and occasional soutane as far as the content goes.

The thing is, Chesterton's Brown does very little active detecting. In the later-set stories, Flambeau does do some leg-work, but Chesterton's point was that the antecedent knowledge of human nature and orthodox ontology gave Brown the perceptiveness to see through to the heart of a situation. He didn't do much material investigation.

The show substitutes standard amateur-detective plots for anything remotely Chestertonian. They also replace Brown's reliance on (what Chesterton saw as) fundamental orthodoxy, especially as regards human nature, with a generic attractive to the 21st century general humanism. It's also badly researched; it looked very much to me as though the writers couldn't really tell the difference between the RCs and the C of E, which is actually minimal in practice today in terms of integration into society - the C of E has become in practice less familiar and the RCs have become far more thoroughly integrated - but was significant in the period.

There really isn't much left, after all that's gone.