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Murder, Mystery, Mayhem And Morse - At Braunston

Tim Coghlan

Tim Coghlan at Braunston Marina recalls a day on location at Braunston Number Two Lock for the filming of the latest television mystery for Inspector Morse (WENC). In it Morse is lying in hospital with a perforated ulcer. With nothing better to do, he looks again through the papers of the murder in 1859 on the Oxford Canal of Joanna Franks, a single woman travelling on a fly boat to London. Morse realises that the boatmen who were hung for it were innocent, and proves who really did it. The production was screened in mid-November 1998.

It had been a long day, with much progress backwards as the canal at Braunston returned to the mid-Victorian age. From early morning the travelling circus had begun to arrive - first the tea wagon and then a multitude of vans, converted old buses, new smart buses, horse boxes emptying their contents to munch the grass and sniff clean air again, carts and carriages, old cars and then later new smart cars of the men who held the strings - as the field normally used for parking at the Braunston Boat Show began to take on the air of a fairground.

Then to a carefully choreographed routine, planned to the last detail, the platoon of scene setters moved up the canal to the Number Two Lock where the day’s shooting would take place. In no time at all they had the place taped - literally. Victorian scene setting is now stock in trade to the British television companies and the competition for authentic accuracy is intense. Someone had discovered that in 1859 there was no such thing as white external window paint - what they tried to make simply went yukkie yellow in the sunlight. It was any colour as long as it was black. So all the windows of that famous little lock keeper’s cottage facing camera were black taped. The larger sheets of glass in the windows were paned down with tape to make little ones. Then a look-alike paper thin door in rough shed brown arrived and was panel pinned over the existing one.

Finishing touches to peasants abiding in the fields

Finally the whole place was given a quick rough up authentic look - hurdles to hide the hideous, sand, straw, and dirt, to finish off the months of neglect British Waterways had given to the chosen place on strict instructions from the location manager - no winter painting, grass cutting or anything. The locks were sprayed yuckie yellow over British Waterways’ last year’s fine white paintwork. And beside the lock was placed a sign - every vandal attacked lock keeper’s dream, “The punishment for tampering with these works is transportation”. A travelling tea urn arrived on a trolley pushed up the towpath from the Bottom Lock. We all sat back and looked at the bridge and through the bridge hole to the lock keeper’s cottage. In that quiet moment before circus arrived Braunston had indeed gone back 140 years in as many minutes.

Towards late morning new faces began to arrive. Amongst the first was a canal version of the Royal National Lifeboat Institute, a man in inflated rescue launch, complete with everything including a stand-by frogman's kit - but no British Waterways day canal licence. The next was the real diva, the star of the show the horse drawn busty Barbara Bray - in real life the recently restored Australia - and transformed by Tony Lewery and David Blagrove into an authentic looking Shroppie fly boat. She had arrived the night before from the Black Country Museum where the town scenes had been successfully filmed.

The boys in black get the powder treatment

The scene to be filmed that day was the arrest scene. In it the four luckless boatmen arrive at the lock above the Duke’s Cut at Oxford and find their way barred by a squad of the boys in black, and are charged with the murder of Joanna Franks who the boatmen thought