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". Boris Karloff starred as Colonel March.
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. Karloff and his wife Evelyn sailed to England in July, 1952, where Karloff filmed 3 different pilot episodes to show TV executives. While awaiting a decision to go ahead with more episodes, the three pilots were combined into a 1953 feature film called Colonel March Investigates. In 1953, Karloff returned to England to film 23 more episodes, making a total of 26, then returned to Hollywood to film Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1953).
The Colonel March series premiered in 1956 with a total of 26 episodes. (It was broadcast from Feb. 1, 1956 through April 1, 1957, which included a number of rerun episodes.) It began running in the United States in February, seven months before British viewers got to see it.
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.
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