Brakes on driving ambitions:
Father Brown stars shares his love of classic cars.
Mark Williams has a confession to make. The British actor, who plays amiable priest Father Brown, admits to coveting the classic cars that feature in the detective series. “We get all these amazing 50s cars because we shoot in the Cotswolds which is quite near Birmingham and Coventry which were essentially (the home of) the British car industry after the war,” he says. “We get these wonderful cars and I never get to try them. There are lots of publicity pictures of me sat in a car because I go and say, ‘Can I sit in it?’.” Instead, Father Brown goes about his business by bicycle, albeit one equipped with the latest in 21st-century technology. “It’s got three Sturmey Archer gears, but its got brilliant bearings so it’s very good at freewheeling. I thoroughly enjoy riding it,” Mark says. Father Brown, the television series based on author GK Chesterton’s turn-of-the-century tales about a mystery-solving Catholic priest, is set in the fictional Cotswold village of Kembleford during the 1950s. Just like Midsomer, it is a village that is over-represented in the crime statistics. “We don’t always have murders but there is a lot of crime,” says Mark, laughing. “Also, the village is a bit like the Tardis. It can expand and contract. One minute it’s the size of a hamlet and the next it’s approximately the size of Coventry. “The other thing about it – I don’t know whether other people have noticed – but it’s like The Simpsons; it’s always July 1953.” It’s a decade viewers can’t seem to get enough of if the popularity of Father
Brown, Call The Midwife and WPC 56 are anything to go by. “I think it was the incubation period for a lot of things,” Mark says. “The beginning of television, the beginning of popular music available to everybody, the beginning of being able to use your car at will, the beginning of feminism, the beginnings of increased understanding of what racism meant.
“It was the start of people doing things like eating garlic, taking foreign holidays, wearing jeans – all of those things we just take for granted. It’s culturally a very interesting period. And the girls look great. A lot of actresses who come on the show all go, ‘Wow’ because they get to wear swishy frocks and we get to wear hats.”
That said, Mark is the show’s star, but he is blown away by the guest actors appearing on Father Brown.
“You look at the cast list and go, ‘Oh my God’ – literally,” he reveals.
“John Duttine (To Serve Them
All My Days, Heartbeat), who I worked with last year, was a real hero of mine when I was trying to become an actor just because of his style and his economy. We actors – like sportsmen and musicians and other artists – look up to people and you learn incredibly from people.
“It’s not necessarily the things that people think it’s going to be. Sometimes it’s just something intangible like stance or style or the way people behave on set to other people. That’s always been a big influence to me.
“Almost every episode has someone in it that I have to go up to and say, ‘Thank you very much’ because it’s such a pleasure to work with these great people.”
However, he is always a bit surprised to be recognised himself – by anyone.
Before Father Brown, Mark was probably best known for playing Arthur Weasley in the Harry
Potter films. He is, however, always surprised when anyone recognises him as the cassock-wearing, bicycle-riding priest that he has played for the past five years.
“In daily life, I don’t really look like him. I’ve got a moustache for example and unruly hair. My stepson says, ‘Mark, your hair looks like clouds’,” the actor says.
“However, I was in the Cotswolds the year before last and there was a very trim American lady – trim in the sense of boat shoes and matching chinos and top – with her husband. They looked like they were possibly lawyers or surgeons or something, and she bowls straight up to me and said, ‘Father Brown, I feel like I know you’.”