Having played the Cotswolds’ most efficient crime-solving Catholic priest for 12 seasons, Mark Williams had just one request for Father Brown’s writers: he wanted his character to take a trip to the seaside. And, in the show’s new season, he does.
“There’s a famous seaside resort called Weston-super-Mare and when I was a kid we used to go there because it was the nearest seaside to Birmingham,” Mark tells TV WEEK.
“So we went. Unfortunately, we got the tides wrong. We were trying to film a sequence with us paddling, but it was two-and-a-half miles to the nearest water. So we ended up flopping around in mud.”
The 66-year-old has now appeared in 140 episodes of Father Brown – “I’ve beaten Peter Falk in Columbo!” – and still isn’t tired of the character.
“He never bores me,” Mark says.
This season, as well as the seaside trip, Father Brown is looking into the death of a rock’n’roll singer, helping out a young single mum with twin babies (“You bring a baby on set and it just changes the tone – a bit like having a puppy”) and sharing a bicycle with Canon Fox (Roger May).
“He gets kidnapped,” Mark reveals.
“And we have to get him to the church on time, which involves a tandem, which was great fun.
“And then we filmed the enthronement of the bishop in a beautiful, beautiful baroque church in Great Witley, which was lovely.”
Mark’s father was an architect and he taught him to always look at buildings. “That’s never left me, really. I’m fascinated everywhere we go.”
As an actor, Mark first found fame on 1990s sketch comedy series The Fast Show, along with its creators Paul Whitehouse and Charlie Higson.
His characters included “I’ll Get Me Coat” and Patrick Nice (“Which was nice”) and they live on in British comedy history.
“My mum used to say ‘Which was nice,’ but she’d forgotten completely where it came from,” Mark remembers with a laugh.
“As far as she was concerned, it was common usage. She’d say ‘Which was nice,’ to me!”
You can watch all episodes of Father Brown season 13 on BritBox.
