Historic Arsenal film on TV tonight

By Tony Attwood

In case you have never seen it, and you have a video recorder it is worth setting it for the small hours tomorrow morning to record “The Arsenal Stadium Mystery”.

It is a gentle murder mystery, made just before the outbreak of war, centred on Highbury and Arsenal FC.

The film kicks off at 0215 – the early hours of 24th February.

The channel is Talking Pictures TV which is on Freeview 81, Sky channel 328, Freesat 306 and Virgin 445, so very much a case of setting the video.

Some of the movie was shot on location at the Highbury Stadium, and was adapted from a novel published earlier in the year, written by Leonard Gribble.

The plot is one that today seems very gentle, but it is in keeping with movie making at the time, as Arsenal play an match against an amateur team, when one of the members of the team dies.  It is found that the player has been poisoned.

Inevitably there is a second murder, and so the story proceeds.  George Allison appears and has a talking part and you can also see Cliff Bastin and Eddie Hapgood, but they don’t have talking parts.  Allison, the most famous manager and indeed the most famous journalist of the era – he was the voice of football on the BBC during the early days of radio commentary.

Some of the scenes are taken from the Arsenal match against Brentford the previous season.

If you like Arsenal history, it is an interesting historic document.

2 Replies to “Historic Arsenal film on TV tonight”

  1. And apart from the obvious Arsenal interest, this is actually a really entertaining movie, considering its age.

  2. What a fascinating film, a real one-off mixing several genres. Talking Pictures is doing a great job of unearthing and reshowing a vast array of material from the past.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *