Colonel March of Scotland Yard

Colonel March of Scotland Yard
Genre	Crime drama, Mystery
Directed by	Cy Endfield Terence Fisher Arthur Crabtree Bernard Knowles and others
Starring	Boris Karloff Ewan Roberts
Composer(s)	Edwin Astley (9 episodes) Philip Green (1 episode) John Lanchbery
Country of origin	United Kingdom
Original language(s)	English
No. of seasons	1
No. of episodes	26
Production
Producer(s)	Hannah Weinstein
Cinematography	Lionel Banes
Running time	30 minutes
Production company(s)	Fountain Films in association with Panda Productions
Distributor	Official Films Peter Rodgers Organization
Release
Original network	ITV
Original release	1 February 1956 – 1 April 1957

Colonel March of Scotland Yard is a 1950s British television series based on author John Dickson Carr's (aka Carter Dickson) fictional detective Colonel March from his book The Department of Queer Complaints (1940). Carr was a mystery author who specialised in locked-room whodunnits and other 'impossible' crimes: murder mysteries that seemed to defy possibility. The stories of the television series followed in the same vein with Detective March solving cases that baffle Scotland Yard and the British police. The department itself is sometimes referred to as "D3".

The series was made at Southall Studios in Middlesex, England (and, later, Nettlefold Studios in Walton-on-Thames, England) was produced by Fountain Films for ITV. The series premiered in 1955 with a total of 26 episodes. The show starred Boris Karloff as the urbane, tweed wearing, eye-patched sleuth. No reason was ever given for the loss of his left eye. (In some close-ups, it is evident that Karloff sometimes wore an eyepatch with a dark gauze area in the centre, presumably to allow him to still see through it.) Other regular actors included Ewan Roberts as Inspector Ames of Scotland Yard and Eric Pohlmann as Inspector Goron of the Paris Sûreté. (In the episode The Second Mona Lisa, Pohlmann played a Middle Eastern character called The Emir.) Roberts' Scottish accent grows stronger as the series progresses from plumby English in the first dozen episodes to full on Scottish burr for the second dozen.

Only twelve episodes of the series still exist as prints in the original 35 mm format, with the rest surviving at 16 mm prints. Two feature films, Colonel March of Scotland Yard and Colonel March Investigates were also released, each containing three episodes of the TV series.^[1]

Although he is referred to on numerous websites including IMDb as Perceval March, the name on his office door clearly states "D3 Colonel A. L. March". In the episode The Silver Curtain, March tells a doctor that his first names are "Perceval Clovis Adlebare" although he is stalling to gain information from the doctor. He then says his occupation is the study of unusual crime, which is true, so that could also be admitting his real name. This may explain why in a later episode, Hot Money, the sign on the door was changed to read "D.3. COL. MARCH".

The opening title sequence showed Colonel March taking off his coat in his office and writing the title of each episode in a book. This then dissolves to an image of an object from within the following story, what Alfred Hitchcock would call a MacGuffin, a fairly unimportant plot device that starts the story rolling and/or keeps it moving along. Often it's a murder weapon or an item of clothing. Sometimes its relevance is a mystery until it is revealed later in the episode. Other episodes, such as in The Headless Hat, show the item that the episode is named after.

The episodes The Talking Head uses the complete version of the original theme tune during the end credits. It was usually truncated and faded up whilst some way through. The show's slightly mysterious and threatening theme tune was changed for the episodes Error at Daybreak and The Silver Curtain to a piece of jaunty, faster paced music that had originally been used in previous episodes to accompany shots of a busy city.

Other guest actors in the series include Christopher Lee, Patrick Barr, Hugh Griffith, Marne Maitland (twice), Joan Sims, Anthony Newley, Patricia Owens, George Coulouris, Anton Diffring, Martin Benson, Zena Marshall and Robert Brown. The episode Death and the Other Monkey features a small acting part by future film director John Schlesinger as a Dutch ship's captain. The episode Error at Daybreak features a performance from the then 10 year old actor Richard O'Sullivan who later went on to star in Robin's Nest and several other ITV series.

As of July 2016 all 26 episodes we available for streaming on the UK Amazon Prime platform. As of September 2016 the series was being screened on UK television channels Talking Pictures TV and London Live.

List of episodes

Availability on Home Video

The series has never been legally released to home video in any format. The region 2 DVD release of the 1970 Karloff film Cauldron of Blood (aka Blind Man's Bluff) includes the episode The Silver Curtain as an extra.

External links

• Colonel March of Scotland Yard at Internet Movie Database

References