Colonel March of Scotland Yard is a British television series consisting of a single season of 26 episodes broadcast in 1955 and 1956. It is based on author John Dickson Carr's fictional detective Colonel March from his book The Department of Queer Complaints. 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". Boris Karloff starred as Colonel March.
Production
The series was made at Southall Studios in Middlesex, England and was produced by Fountain Films for ITV. In July, 1952, Karloff and his wife Evelyn sailed to England, where Karloff filmed three different pilot episodes to be shown to TV executives. While awaiting a decision on more episodes, the three pilots were combined into a feature film called Colonel March Investigates. In 1953, Karloff returned to England to film 23 more episodes, making a total of 26. The Colonel March series premiered in 1955 on Associated Television with a total of 26 episodes. It began running in the United States in February 1956, five months after British viewers had seen it. The show starred Boris Karloff as the urbane, tweed-wearing, eye-patched sleuth. No reason was ever given for the wearing of the patch. Other regular actors included Ewan Roberts as Inspector Ames of Scotland Yard and Eric Pohlmann as Inspector Goron of the Paris Sûreté. Roberts' Scottish accent grows stronger as the series progresses, from plummy English in the first dozen episodes to full-on Scottish burr for the second dozen. 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 episode "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 Alan Wheatley, ChristopherLee, Patrick Barr, Hugh Griffith, Marne Maitland, Joan Sims, Anthony Newley, Patricia Owens, George Coulouris, Anton Diffring, Martin Benson, Zena Marshall, Mary Parker and Robert Brown. The episode "Death and the Other Monkey" features a small acting part by future film directorJohn 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 Man About the House, Robin's Nest and several other ITV series.
Critical reception
In Britain, the series was initially evaluated in the larger context of the programming of the newly launched ITV: "If there were only something of signifiant badness, then one could at least take a hatchet to it. But who could take a hatchet to Wilson, Keppel, and Betty, stars of Saturday night's variety programme, or to the adventures of 'Colonel March of Scotland Yard', the intellectual content of which is the nearest thing to a hole I have ever seen?"
Eight episodes of the series have been released to home video by Alpha Video. The region 2 DVD release of the 1970 Karloff film Cauldron of Blood includes the episode "The Silver Curtain" as an extra. All 26 episodes are available to stream on Amazon Prime.
