The Case of the Lively Ghost

Colonel March is brilliant as the sceptic who most courteously regards the professional mystic as a completely competent fraudstess...were this a word. She knows he knows, yet he's happy to work with her, for what appears an unexplained apparition....even by her standards of trickery. It's a brilliant take to a commonly used tale. One item to take home is the classical camera work during the supposed seance. When the room are dimmed, the arc lights stay on, so all the occupants can still clearly be seen. This is utterly unlike current practice where everything goes dark, and the audience sits looking at a blank screen for several minutes. Realism is one thing, but it's useless if you can't see what's happening. Bring back the 'good old days'.

THE CASE OF THE LIVELY GHOST - what a great title - is a fun, seance-themed episode of Colonel March. March is a delightfully disbelieving character in this one who agrees to help a fraudulent medium being haunted by an all-too real ghost. The whole episode is themed around trickery and fakery and the seance scenes are naturally fun and engaging.

Karloff remains the main reason to watch these short detective stories. His distinctive look and naturalistic acting make him a thoroughly likable lead character and his repartee and interaction with the rest of the cast is always engaging. This episode could be described as light and dated by some, but it's the warmth and enthusiasm of the cast, Karloff in particular, that sees it through.

Fake spiritualist Madame Richter believes she's actually received some ghostly messages from the other side.

Hard work, this one sadly wasn't very good. The first thing that will spring to your mind, is just how random The Good Colonel's friend set is, he really does now some odd people, none order than Madame Richter.

The story was dull, I have seen similar stories in other shows, this one lacked the ghostly, sinister atmosphere to compete with them, the delivery here was pretty flat.

Virginia Downing was rather amusing as Madame Arkati (sorry) and Tony Wright did an ok Job in the double role.

Just about ok, 4/10.

Madame Richter, a con artist spiritualist come to see March with an odd story. He greets her with saying "My old fortune telling friend. People go to fortune tellers for one of two reasons - hope or fear." Madame Richter then tells him that one of her clients, Mrs. Fortesque, wanted to communicate with her dead son. But then during a séance the fake apparition didn't appear but a real one did! At the home of Mrs. Fortesque, Madame Richter shows March how her fake séance worked but he already knew many of the tricks of how phony spiritualism worked. This was the best and most interesting part of the episode. Colonel March later participates in a séance and again strange happenings occur - including a murder. It's pretty easy to figure out the truth of the matter so the episode wasn't particularly suspenseful. March's concluding remark is "A spiritualist who believes in spirits - there may be hope for the rest of us." The whole fascinating business about séance tricks makes this episode worth watching and as ever, Karloff's portrayal of Colonel March is engaging.

Episode 7, "The Case of the Lively Ghost" sees a queer complaint from Madame Richter (Virginia Downing), a phony spiritualist who believes she actually summoned the ghost of Henry Fortescue, sent to Canada by his grieving mother (Dulcie Bowman), who recently was delivered the sad news behind his death by a man named Fenton. Henry's fiancée, Victoria Hibbing (Genine Graham), daughter of Lord Hibbing (Tristan Rawson), is now seeing his lookalike brother Terry (Tony Wright), and everyone has been summoned by Henry's ghost to attend the next seance. Fenton is soon discovered murdered, so Colonel March decides to join the audience in order to ferret out the killer, dead or alive. A plot done to death in prior decades, par for the course for this series.