This week I am in New Hampshire, teaching Wuthering Heights as part of the tutorial on British Romanticism that I’m offering to juniors and seniors at Thomas More College.

It’s been an exciting and lively week.

Last Saturday I was one of four speakers at a Catholic Literature Conference in Concord. Fr. Michael Kerper gave an excellent talk on Walker Percy, Mitchell Kalpagian spoke on Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Thomas Howard waxed lyrical on the poetry of C. S. Lewis. I rounded things off with a talk on the Catholicism of The Lord of the Rings.

It was a real joy to meet my old friend, Thomas Howard, who I hadn’t seen since both of us were speaking at the Chesterton Conference in Rochester, New York, probably about five years ago. It was also good to spend time with Fr. Kerper and Dr. Kalpakgian, both of whom I’ve got to know very well since I began my regular visits to New Hampshire.

Last night I gave a talk at a fundraising dinner for Holy Family Academy in Manchester, speaking on my conversion. It was a privilege to become acquainted with the wonderful people associated with this exciting and vibrant school.

The most pleasant surprise this week, however, had nothing to do with my teaching or speaking engagements, but with a chance encounter with Chesterton’s Father Brown on television.

I arrived back at the apartment at which I am staying on Tuesday evening, having walked the four miles from campus in the fading light of a beautiful but brisk spring day, and switched on the TV, expecting the worst.

Imagine my surprise to discover that an episode of the new BBC series of Father Brown was just starting. I had heard of this new series but had not seen any of the episodes.

I was still expecting the worst, bracing myself for a crass modern treatment of Chesterton’s classic detective stories. Would Fr. Brown be cast as an unlovable and reactionary cleric? Worse, would he have metamorphosed into a banal and heretical modernist to conform with modern secular sensibilities? Would we have the usual meretriciousness on the part of female characters, coupled with gratuitously crass sex scenes?

Convinced that I would hate what I was about to see, I braced myself for the worst.

The opening scene seemed to suggest that my worst expectations would come to bitter frution. As the opening credits ended, an attractive young lady clawed seductively at a young man at the door of the church, evidently as they were leaving Mass, hinting none too subtly that she was ripe for the plucking. The incongruity of such a scenario beggared belief.

What followed also beggarded belief but in a pleasantly surprising way. After the unpromising start, things got better and better.

Father Brown was clearly a genuine believer, orthodox in doctrine, and eminently likeable. Furthermore, and to my delighted astonishment, the plot turned on the discovery of a secret priest’s hole and the unearthing of a martyred priest, the skeletal corpse of whom was still clutching a rosary.

Then, just as I thought that things could not get any better, the cynically skeptical police detective finds himself in Father Brown’s church in a desperate situation, his grudging love for the priest prompting him to pray, for the first time in his life, seeking a sign that would help him discover the priest’s whereabouts. The sign is duly given and the priest and the detective are reunited.

Then, as the final coup de grace, the girl who had affronted my sensibilities in the opening scene comes to her senses and ends relatively virtuously.

What an unexpected joy it was to find myself watching televison and being so astonishingly surprised by Father Brown! For one night at least, the BBC had become an acronym for Bravo! Bravissimo! Chesterton!