Paul Temple and Steve

April 1938 saw the transmission on the BBC's Midland Regional Programme of a thriller serial called 'Send for Paul Temple', written by Francis Durbridge. For the next thirty years, until 1968, the incomparably suave private detective and crime novelist Paul, together with his glamorous Fleet Street journalist wife Steve, solved case after baffling case in one of BBC radio's most enduringly popular series. Unfortunately, recordings of many of the early series are lost to the archives.

In 2006 Radio 4 broadcast a brand new production of one of the missing Temples - the ninth series, 'Paul Temple and the Sullivan Mystery', with Crawford Logan and Gerda Stevenson as Paul and Steve. Using vintage microphones and sound effects, and much of the original incidental music, the production was as far as possible a technical and stylistic replica of how the 1947 original might have sounded if its recording had survived. It proved enormously popular with the audience on Radio 4, and subsequently on Radio 7, with hundreds of letters, e-mails and phone calls. A second revival in 2008 (this time of 'Paul Temple and the Madison Mystery') proved equally popular. So, here we go again, with 'Paul Temple and Steve', which was first broadcast on the BBC's Light Programme in eight weekly episodes from 30th March 1947 to 18th May 1947.

Francis Durbridge, the creator of Paul Temple, was born in Hull in 1912 and died in 1998. He one of the most successful novelists, playwrights and scriptwriters of his day.