Rumpole of the Bailey, Season Four (1987)

Over three years passed between the third and fourth seasons of Rumpole of the Bailey, the longest gap in the series. This is where the divide falls between the early years of Rumpole when the series still had something of an edge to it and the capacity to be unpredictable, and the latter years when the series, while still containing much to enjoy and many individually well-written and performed episodes (and the occasional surprise), was on the whole a far more safely comedic, formulaic, and the televisual equivalent of a comfortable pair of slippers.

The length of the gap between seasons is one reason why I would place the divide here. The other is that here is where we get the second Hilda Rumpole, from now on played by Marion Mathie. Mathie's version of Hilda is a more overtly sitcommy, 'battleaxe' take than Peggy Thorpe-Bates's Hilda ever was, and it is hard to argue that this is entirely due to the scripts. The first episode of the season is heavy on the new Hilda, perhaps to get audiences used to the change as quickly as possible.

Another example of the sitcomisation of the series is to be found in the increasingly broad characterisation of Claude Erskine-Brown, who is by this point a caricature of himself as he was in the first season. His relationship to Rumpole had previously developed from rival to friendly rival, and by now they are simply friends and colleagues (his original role ceded to Ballard), and the plots of two episodes involve Erskine-Brown's old public school friends being put in touch with Rumpole through him.

The first of these is Rumpole and the Blind Tasting, which is most notable for introducing us to Judge Graves ("Mr Injustice Graves" as Rumpole calls him), played by Robin "of the" Bailey, who will go on to be one of the most frequently reoccurring judges from this point on, and is probably second only to Judge Bullingham in terms of the most memorable of Rumpole's judicial antagonists.

Almost as noteworthy is the appearance of Stephen "Travis" Greif as the first of Erskine-Brown's old school friends, although in this case "friend" turns out to be the wrong word as he cheerfully tells Rumpole about how he used to bully Erskine-Brown - an efficient way of making it clear to viewers that he is the villain of the episode.

In terms of one-off guest appearances, the episode Rumpole and the Official Secret supplies us with several of note. Judy Cornwell is immediately recognisable from Paradise Towels (made the same year as this), although she is probably better known for the sitcom Keeping Up Appearances. Paul "Dr Bellfriar from Killer" Daneman plays the Lord Chief Justice, while Donald Pickering (who was also in Doctor Who that year, as Beyus in Time and the Rani) and Peter Cellier, both familiar faces from their having played senior civil servants in Yes Prime Minister around this time, here play senior civil servants. Cellier's character is even called Sir Frank again!

This is my favourite of this season, where Rumpole defends a lowly civil service secretary who is charged with leaking trivial (but still secret) details of civil service expenditure to the press. Again Rumpole becomes involved when the accused's boss is an old friend of Claude Erskine-Brown, and is put in touch with Rumpole to try and have the charges "laughed out of court." But things then become increasingly serious as more secrets are revealed, and more senior civil servants get involved. The stakes are high when Rumpole finds himself facing the most senior judge in the land, the Lord Chief Justice, and he is not sympathetic to the defence.

The most sitcomish episode of the season coincides with Peter Bowles making his now obligatory one-episode-a-season showing as Judge Featherstone. Unusually for the series, a great deal of the episode is shown from Featherstone's point of view, not Rumpole's. Having visited a massage parlour (for entirely innocent reasons - hence the story title Rumpole and the Judge's Elbow) and paid by credit card, Featherstone finds himself trying a case of a massage parlour used for "immoral purposes." Not remembering the name of the place he visited, and terrified in case it is the same one, he then spends much of the episode being thwarted in his attempts to find out if he is in the clear or if his receipts might be used in the defence's evidence.

Rumpole, who is of course the barrister acting for the defendant, is for once presented to us as though he is the antagonist. While everything turns out all right for the judge in the end, this is a rare case where Rumpole is on the losing side, especially in this latter part of the series. It just goes to show that the series still has the capacity to surprise us, and to test the limits of its increasingly restrictive format.

A much more familiar sort of format-breaker is to be found in Rumpole and the Bright Seraphim, the one-episode-a-season when Rumpole travels outside London for a case. Travelling to West Germany to defend a British soldier accused of murder, the setting may be out of the ordinary, but the plot structure is anything but - Rumpole pokes holes in the prosecution's case, sees through what a supposedly helpful character is trying to make him believe, and identifies the real culprit. The scene of Rumpole cross-examining a too-full-of-himself medical examiner is virtually a repeat of when he did the same thing in season three's Rumpole and the Sporting Life.

By themselves these aren't major problems, and they'd hardly be the first time the writer John Mortimer has reused his plot beats and character tics. Where the story really suffers from is in being poorly edited to fit into a single episode's duration. This has two consequences - firstly that we end up missing any explanation of how Rumpole deduced the real killer. While there is a scene where we viewers see her smile an 'I've-gotten-away-with-it' smile to herself, indicating her guilt to us at home, Rumpole is not privy to this and so his conclusion appears to be based on nothing.

The story's guest characters also suffer. Despite this being Judge George Frobisher's first appearance since Rumpole's Return (and that was only a cameo), hardly anything is made of this and Rumpole doesn't interact with him outside of the courtroom, meaning this might as well have been any random judge-of-the-week, not one of Rumpole's oldest friends. Other guest characters fare just as badly, and the distinctive voice of Peter Jones is wasted in a small part.

Rumpole's Last Case continues the tradition of the final episode of the season trying to convince viewers that this might just be the very last episode of all. This is one of the least successful attempts, being as it is centred on Rumpole trying to win enough money to retire on by betting on a horse race "accumulator," and then when he does win discovering that the prison "screw" who place the bet for him has absconded with the winnings. Except that the end of season two and Rumpole's Return both made it very clear that Rumpole could retire whenever he liked and go to live with his son in America, so this motivation for Rumpole is a clear case of him acting out of character for the sake of the plot.

Sadly this would turn out to be the Last Case for one of the show's most memorable recurring characters - this is the last of the six appearances by Bill Fraser as arguably Rumpole's greatest adversary, "the Mad Bull" Judge Bullingham. He leaves a big wig to fill.

In terms of overall quality, this is a much more variable season than any of the ones before it. While none of the episodes are outright bad, there are really only two that stand out from the crowd, and for different reasons: Rumpole and the Official Secret for drama, Rumpole and the Judge's Elbow for comedy.