The wrong shape

Clearly you missed it when Mrs Quinton (the wife) told Father Brown that her baby was born grotesquely deformed and has *the wrong shape*(she actually said the word!). I have no idea why you would connect the wrong shape to the shape of building or notes (well, maybe the writing, but not the shape of the note paper itself).

I have decided to completely avoid any comparions with either the real stories or the Kenneth More series.

This "Father Brown" simply bears no resemblance to the Chesterton books.

So on that basis the series stands or falls in its own right .. a bit like the Margaret Rutherford "Miss Marple" .. not Christie but fun in their own right.

I have issues with these Father Browns not because they are not pure Chesterton... but they are a sort of faux 50s. Nothing is real in the same way as the recent Marple series has been. Arch, overacted and in a way no respect for the original work or characters.

Sad really because the talent in front of the camera is excellent.

and can Inspector Valentine PLEASE do his tie properly... no-one of his status would be seen with his tie askew and button undone ...and in a way that sums up the series .. caricature, not the real thing..

Apart from the major plot differences, I think the characterisation of Father Brown was highly questionable in this story. The idea that it is "dangerous" to read the Gospel "too literally" is bizarre, and would surely not have been expressed by the character in the short stories. He is a devout man who takes his religion seriously, and would never have joined the Church if he did not believe in transubstantiation (for instance), which is a very "literal" view of the Gospel.

Much of the intrigue from the original stories comes from Chesterton's dialectical representation of Father Brown in relation to atheists, agnostics, Protestants and heathens. This theme was established in the very first story, with the contrast between Father Brown and Flambeau (who was posing as a priest), and between Father Brown and Valentin, the rationalistic secular detective. It is present in all of the subsequent stories, but it is barely present in this television series.

I also found it disappointing - but rather predictable - that the knife was removed from the story. I rather like Father Brown's reaction to the knife in the story: "it's the wrong shape in the abstract. Don't you ever feel that about Eastern art? The colours are intoxicatingly lovely; but the shapes are mean and bad – deliberately mean and bad". Of course, this is a sentiment which will never be expressed by the protagonist of a BBC programme, because it does not gel with the general editoral stance of the BBC (i.e. dogmatic pro-multiculturalism).

Instead, the scriptwriter chose to present Father Brown as a modernist, and as something of a cultural relativist. When the murderer criticises India in this episode, Father Brown responds by saying "have you ever been to India?", as if to suggest that his negative perception can only possibly be the result of ignorance. How does this relate to the quotation from my previous paragraph, in which Father Brown expresses a deep scepticism towards Western Orientalism? The point of that quotation is to stress a fundamental difference between the Roman Catholic Church and Hinduism, at least from the perspective of Father Brown (and, therefore, a difference between the civilisations and cultures which are largely predicated on the two religions). The disorder of their art is very different from the structure and unity of, say, Giotto or Bouguereau. It points to a separate disposition, but this was deliberately excised from the television adaptation.

Whatever one thinks of this perspective (I have seen several modern reviewers condemning Chesterton for it), it would be folly to deny that our protagonist has been substantially altered in order to conform with the BBC's contemporary standards. They might have been better off taking the fictional Anglican vicar from "Rev" (or somesuch original BBC creation) and writing him into a series of detective stories. At least then, they would not be transforming a classic character beyond recognition.