Mortimer is inseparable from his altar-ego, barrister Horace Rumpole. George Orwell once remarked that some characters are so well created they seem to have a life of their own outside the story they inhabit. Rumpole is just such a creation. Beautifully drawn and bulging with habits and eccentricities, the Wordsworth loving, claret quaffing hack is Mortimer's passport to immortality.
Rumpole's first outing sees the barrister defending a black youth from the bullying, racist authorities, in a typically direct piece of storytelling. It is also Rumpole's grittiest portrayal, with few whimsical supporting characters on display, giving the play a little more bite and less cosiness than in the series that followed.
When Mortimer was asked to write a Play For Today in 1975, he initially thought of creating a detective character "to keep me alive in my old age. Then one day I was at the Bailey sitting next to James Burge, who had defended Dr Stephen Ward. We were defending a gang of football hooligans who had murdered a man at Charing Cross Station. James leaned over to me and said 'I'm an anarchist at heart, but I dare say even my darling Prince Peter Kropotkin wouldn't defend this lot.'"
My Darling Prince Peter Kropotkin, a reference to a Russian revolutionary, immediately became the working title of a play about the Old Bailey hacks who would defend anyone, however disgusting. A play about those barristers who represented all the freedoms society constantly tries to chip away at. Rumpole is the sort of barrister who Mortimer describes as a "freelance freedom fighter" with no obligation to any great law firms or conventions.
With a title change and the great Leo McKern perfectly cast as the hero, Rumpole became a television institution which ran for nearly 20 years.
Simon Farquhar
Rumpole was offered to Alastair Sim and Michael Hordern before Leo McKern was suggested for the part.
