These half hour Colonel March episodes were made and shown in the mid fifties on ITV I am pretty sure.

Only 26 were ever made but the ones I have seen are pretty good considering the time they had and maybe, a limited budget.

Boris Karloff as Inspector March here with John Laurie in a scene from ‘Present Tense’ a quite absorbing drama about Col March’s niece played by Mary Parker whose husband perishes in a plane crash – or does he ? His Wife seems to sense his ghost in the house and hears the piano playing in the style of her husband. All is eventually revealed.

Her husband is played by Peter Reynolds who I had seen not that long ago in a film with Diana Dors called ‘The Last Page’ in which he played another quite unsavoury character. He certainly looked the part and was very good. He was in a lot of films and TV here

He moved to Australia in the late sixties and appeared in quite a lot of productions there. He died in Melbourne in 1975 in a fire in his flat which also saw the death of his pet dog.

Then in the leading role was Mary Parker, an actress I didn’t know but I could see that she was very capable and it did make me wonder why I had no knowledge of her.

Looking further, it seems that she went to live in Australia – she had been brought up in Melbourne – and had a very successful career in Television right from it’s launch

“Everybody in England knew Mary Parker”, said her husband, Paul Fitzgerald. “In England she did several films with Sir Douglas Fairbanks Jr – I’ve seen her name in lights on Shaftesbury Avenue and then she worked on TV as an announcer. They also brought her out to Australia in 1956 to open the (television coverage of the) Olympic Games – she was the first woman on television in (Melbourne)

We all know Boris Karloff – he came to England in 1952 to make the ‘Colonel March’ films and in fact made the first three ‘Pilot’ episodes which were joined together and released as a feature film in cinemas – the film was entitled ‘Colonel March Investigates’

He then did the other 26 episodes which went out first in America and then here. They have been repeated again and again on both sides of the Atlantic