Though I have already started to have a very different appreciation of Horace Rumpole, Old Bailey Hack, as a character, even before the first series is over, episode 5 persuaded me that at this stage the series is a very strong contender. At first, I thought this week’s case was going to be a middling, not-very-interesting crime – a Post Office safe blowing – in respect of which I’d remembered the twist immediately, but I was to be so dismissive. Let’s look at why.
We are now making haste very slowly to the contemporary period, this episode being set in 1976 (though, frankly, the date is completely irrelevant except for the fact that Miss Phyllida Trant is developing into a very interesting and independent character, learning all the right things from her Learned Friend in Chambers, whilst permitting the intentions of that long streak of piss, Claude Erskine-Brown).
Anyway: Rumpole’s at home in bed with the flu and considering dying until he is summoned into Chambers on a brief to represent professional safe-breaker Charlie Wheeler (Ken Jones, largely suppressing his characteristic Liverpool accent as needs must for a Dartford villain). It appears that Wheeler’s guilt is pinned to the wall by his fingerprints being found on a small lump of gelignite left behind at the scene of the crime. This arouses Rumpole’s enthusiasm – what professional safecracker would do something like that? – which is promptly dispelled by discovering that he is not leading the case but will be acting as Junior to a Silk, i.e., Guthrie Featherstone, QC, MP, struggling to conceal his distaste for the sordidness of the matter, his client and prepared already to concede an open-and-shut case. And he’s the Defending Counsel.
Rumpole, naturally, disagrees. ‘Never Plead Guilty’ is his watchword. Featherstone clearly thinks all this is beneath him, but Rumpole is always alive to the fact that this is a human being, facing the prospect of a minimum eight year stretch in Brixton. Rumpole naturally gravitates to a fight, yes, largely because he enjoys the scrap, but also because he believes that if a person’s liberty, life, reputation is to be taken away, it should only be done in the most certain of conditions. Featherstone is hardly untypical of Barristers, seeing the client as unimportant on every level, and not eager to break a sweat to defend someone who is likely to be guilty, if not of this crime, then of another one.
That’s a vital element of the episode. As I said, I recognised the twist immediately. Charlie Wheeler’s dabs get on the jelly because a crooked copper, Detective Inspector ‘Dirty’ Dickerson (Malcolm Storry) got him to shake hands in the dark of 2.00am at Dartford Nick. Charlie’s been fitted up because he doesn’t pay regular sweeteners to Dickerson. All this Rumpole gleans on his own: Featherstone has been insistent from the outset that the one thing they mustn’t do is attack the Police, especially not before this Judge (Bill Fraser, who I can never ever think of without remembering his as Snudge alongside Alfie Bass in Bootsie and Snudge, making his first appearance as the violently prejudiced Judge Roger ‘The Mad Bull’ Bullingham), who will increase the sentence out of spite for attacking the coppers.
So things come to pass. A journalist, Kim Philbeam (name chosen to echo that of Philby and McLean, notorious defectors?) alerts Rumpole to Dickerson’s habits but cannot produce the vital witness in time. With Featherstone laid up with his flu, Rumpole takes the case over and mounts the attack, on the instructions of his client who, in an egregious breach of protocol, he has seen on his own, without the Solicitor present. This is protocol, of which Horace is no respecter, and there’s also a bloody good reason for it because, when Rumpole attacks Dickerson in the witness box, without supporting evidence, The Mad Bull lifts Wheeler’s sentence to twelve years and he claims Rumpole was acting against his instructions. And Rumpole has no supporting evidence to refute that.
So far as the case in concerned, that all comes out in the wash. Philbeam produces the witness, however belatedly, who does pay Dickerson, and wears a wire to collect Dickerson admitting fitting up Charlie. All becomes well, Rumpole is vindicated, Charlie will be released, his conviction unsafe (that is me, not the programme, but there’s no other course).
In the meantime though, the episode focussed on Rumpole under threat of the Senate of the Bar, judging his case, defended by Featherstone the mitigator. His whole life, which has been dedicated to the Law, is under threat. He could be disbarred. Even if he is mnerely suspended, he intends to retire. The Bar has tried and convicted him before hearing the evidence, which is emblematic of the attitude towards crime shown throughout the episode. Without the least histrionics from anyone except Rumpole, the episode is a savage and thorough denouncement of the Law, especially in the form of the acidly prejuduiced Bullingham, doing his best to convict his Defendant and hinder the Defence.
Rumpole muses on the life he’s led, and the prospect of peace and quiet in the country, growing a market garden. In keeeping wth the comments I’ve made over the past two weeks, he muses about the roles he’s played, and who or what he really is underneath the Barrister’s equivalent of the motley and the greasepaint. Will he now have the chance to find out? In this hour of doubt, the only one to back him, truly back him, is not his best friend George Frobisher, is not his wife of thirty-odd years, but Miss Trant, who tells him: Never Plead Guilty.
Yes, despite my initial doubts, an excellent episode. This really was, for all its flaws I’ve touched upon, a very good series, rather darker and more serious – and melancholy – than our memories tell us it was. A salutory reminder.