Colonel March of Scotland Yard

Colonel March of Scotland Yard is a British television series consisting of a single season of 26 episodes first broadcast in the United States from Dec. 1954 to Spring of 1955. The series premiered on British television on 24 September 1955 on the newly opened ITV London station for the weekends Associated Television. It is 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. Production The series was made at Southall Studios in Middlesex, England (and, later, Nettlefold Studios in Walton-on-Thames, England) and was produced by Fountain Films for ITV. In July 1952, Karloff and his wife Evelyn sailed to England, where Karloff filmed three different pilot episodes to be shown to TV executives. While awaiting a decision on more episodes, the three pilots were combined into a feature film called Colonel March Investigates (1953). In 1953, Karloff returned to England to film 23 more episodes, making a total of 26. The Colonel March TV series premiered first in the United States from Dec. 1954 to Spring of 1955, with a total of 26 episodes. It first premiered in England in 1955 on Associated Television (ITV London, weekends), broadcast on 26 consecutive Saturday evenings from 24 September 1955 until 17 March 1956. The show starred Boris Karloff as the urbane, tweed-wearing, eye-patched sleuth. No reason was ever given for the wearing of the patch. 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 posh English in the some episodes to strong Scottish burr for others.