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OTD in early British television: 24 February 1939

24th February 2025

John Wyver writes: The evening schedule of Friday 24 February 1939 featured a half-hour police drama with a twist, since you, the viewer, were expected to solve the crime. The Fletcher Case was the third of the occasional Telecrime series, of which the second, Poetic Justice, with Joan Miller and Charles Farrell is illustrated above.

As the billing said, ‘Viewers will be given sufficient evidence to enable them to solve the problem which confronts Inspector Holt’, who was played in Stephen Harrison’s production by J.B. Rowe.

These five short pre-war Telecrime productions (the series was also revived after the conflict) were the brainchild of insurance clerk Mileson Horton (whose Christian name was actually Denis), and they developed his weekly series of magazine features called Photocrimes.

Published since 1935 by Odhams Press in Weekly Illustrated, each column featured a dozen or so photographs arranged with actors in simple sets, plus a brief explanatory text. The aftermath of a crime was pictured and the reader was supposedly provided with sufficient information to identify the perpetrator. Extending the contemporary fascination with whodunits in this ‘golden age’ of detective fiction, the popular print series was syndicated in the United States and collected in two books. 

Translated to television, the idea was conceived to make the most of this medium’s visual potential, although judging from the only surviving script and camera plan, which is for the fourth production, The Almost Perfect Murder, the two-set, four-camera presentation was penny-plain.

A survey of the crime scene by Scotland Yard’s stalwart Inspector Holt (Rowe, once again) was followed by brief interrogations of suspects. Then, to the surprise of the local policeman whose money was on the character ‘Archer’, the actual murderer revealed himself by fleeing the scene. Holt ordered a train station arrest before a fade to black and a single character caption: ‘?’

Over this, the announcer said, ‘And now ladies and gentlemen, we ask you to make up your own minds, “how did Inspector Holt reach his conclusion?” We will give you the opportunity of studying the evidence for a few moments.’

The scene changed to the victim slumped across his desk before closing, as a recorded ticking was faded up on the soundtrack, on a shot of a clock and a calendar. After which the broadcast returned to Holt for an explanation that involved the murderer having not altered a clock with the arrival of British summer-time.

We also have Grace Wyndham Goldie’s somewhat dismissive review of The Fletcher Case, and an image from The Listener, below:

The scene is Scotland Yard. The bovine sergeant is explaining to hawk-faced Inspector Holt that there is nothing in the business. Old Fletcher committed suicide. The revolver was found in his right hand.

Brrrrr, goes the telephone. A large-eyed young woman (this part was nicely taken by Hazel Terry) is talking. She has something more to’tell the sergeant. Her uncle, old Mr. Fletcher, was ledft-handed. And there are other things. But someone is coming. She drops the telephone.

There is a discussion at Scotland Yard. Keen-witted Inspector Holt decides that the Fletcher case may not be suicide after all. ‘You’d better get down there, sergeant’. And so, for about fifteen minutes, to the Fletcher house and another murder.

Then Miss Cowell’s attractive face appears upon the screen. She says: ‘ Well, who did do the murder? Viewers have now all the evidence necessary to detect the criminal’. There is a second’s pause for us torack our brains.

And then the screen goes on to show Inspector Holt polishing matters off, arresting the murderer and explaining to his dumbfounded sergeant exactly how and why the murders were done.

As an idea for a series it is obviously excellent. The sketches are short, which is good; they are specially written for television, which is better; they are something which television alone can give us, which is best of all. And one recent Telecrime about a gangster murder in the U.S.A. was first-rate television stuff.

Last Friday’s example was less effective. The pace was too slow, the first discussion at Scotland Yard, for example, seemed interminable; the dialogue was too .flat and the characters were too boring. In an affair of this kind nobody expects any depth or subtlety of characterisation.

But the people in the story must be made just sufficiently interesting for us to care which of them is hanged. And I didn’t care which of the Fletchers disappeared from life. So l couldn’t be bothered to worry about the clues.