Paul Temple

Paul Temple is a fictional character created by English writer Francis Durbridge. Temple is a professional author of crime fiction and an amateur private detective. With his wife Louise, affectionately known as 'Steve' in reference to her journalistic pen name 'Steve Trent', he solves whodunnit crimes through subtle, humorously articulated deduction. Always the gentleman, the strongest expletive he employs is "''by Timothy!''".

Created for the BBC radio serial ''Send for Paul Temple'' in 1938, the Temples featured in more than 30 BBC radio dramas, twelve serials for German radio, four British feature films, a dozen novels, and a BBC television series. A ''Paul Temple'' daily newspaper strip ran in the '' London Evening News'' for two decades.

Overview

Paul Temple was a professional novelist. While he possessed no formal training as a detective, his background in constructing crime plots for his novels enabled him to apply deductive reasoning to solve cases whose solution had eluded Scotland Yard.

Over the course of each case, Temple eschewed formal interviews or other police techniques, in favour of casual conversations with suspects and witnesses. Yet even this informal style of investigation invariably precipitated attempts by the suspects to hamper him, through traps, ambushes, even assassination attempts. Surviving these, Temple would arrange a cocktail party or similar social event at which he unmasked the perpetrator.

At the end of each tale, Paul, Steve and Sir Graham Forbes held a ''post mortem''. Here, Paul explained why certain events in the serial took place, which of these had been red herrings, and which had been genuine clues. Some elements of the plot had already been explained during the serial, while others were occasionally never fully explained, due to limitations of time and deficiencies in the writer’s ability to plot. In general, the serials feature similar types of events, often in the same sequence.

Works

Original radio serials

The Paul Temple characters and formula were developed in a succession of BBC Radio serials broadcast between 1938 and 1968, with several radio actors portraying the Temples. After the war the character was played by a succession of different actors: Barry Morse (1945), Howard Marion-Crawford (1946) and Kim Peacock (1946–1951). The longest-running team, and the most popular with audiences, was Peter Coke (pronounced ''Cooke'') and Marjorie Westbury, who starred together in every serial made between 1954 and 1968; Westbury had played the role in every serial aired between 1945 and 1954.

The radio series was a collaboration between writer Francis Durbridge and BBC producer Martyn C Webster, both of whom worked all of the radio broadcasts aired over the thirty years from 1938 to 1968. Durbridge was still at college when he approached Webster, who was then with the BBC Midland Region, with his proposal for a mystery series about a gentleman detective.

Initially the serials were broadcast on the service in the BBC Midlands Region service. As they gained in popularity, they were aired nationally instead on the Home Service. However, in 1945, they found a new permanent home on the Light Programme, which too was a national station, where they remained (save for occasional repeats on the Home Service) until the last serial in 1968. The introductory and closing music for the majority of the serials was '' Coronation Scot'', composed by Vivian Ellis, though the earliest serials (those aired prior to December 1947) used an excerpt from ''Scheherazade'' by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Repeats of some serials continued to be heard on the successor to the Home Service, Radio 4, during the 1980s, and as late as 1992 (when ''The Spencer Affair'' was repeated to celebrate Francis Durbridge's 80th birthday).

Many of the earliest serials, in which the eponymous hero was played by many actors, have not survived. Several were remade in the 1940s, in abridged form, as feature films. However, some of the early radio serials do still exist, including ''Paul Temple Intervenes'' from 1942, featuring the first appearance in the series by Westbury, in a supporting role. All but one of the serials starring Peter Coke also exist: since 2003, these have been regularly repeated on digital station BBC Radio 7 (now BBC Radio 4 Extra). In 2006, the station tracked down the then 93-year-old Coke for a half-hour interview programme, ''Peter Coke and the Paul Temple Affair'', and the actor was also interviewed in 1998 for a half-hour documentar
''Send For Paul Temple''
an episode in the series ''The Radio Detectives''.

Because no recordings survive for many of the early serials, in 2006 BBC Radio 4 began recreating them, in as authentic a manner as possible: as mono productions, employing vintage microphones and sound effects, and using the original scripts. In all cases Crawford Logan starred as Paul Temple with Gerda Stevenson as Steve, in place of the original leads. The first of these broadcasts, in August 2006, was a new eight-part production of ''Paul Temple and the Sullivan Mystery'', originally aired in 1947. A new production of ''The Madison Mystery'', from 1949, aired between May and July 2008, followed by the 1947 serial ''Paul Temple and Steve'' in June and July 2010. ''A Case for Paul Temple'', from 1946, was transmitted in August and September 2011. The final such production to date was ''Paul Temple and the Gregory Affair'', aired in 2013 (the longest of all the serials, running to ten episodes). Many of these new productions featured Welsh actor Gareth Thomas as the head of Scotland Yard. Each of the new recordings was also released on CD.

Paul Temple's catchphrase, "by Timothy", first occurred in episode two of the first ever serial, ''Send for Paul Temple''. As spoken by Kim Peacock in the 1940s serials, it made Temple sound like Wilfrid Hyde-White (it was a phrase Hyde-White frequently used, particularly in the BBC Radio series ''The Men from the Ministry''). Interviewed in 2006, Peter Coke said he hated the phrase, because even in the 1950s he thought it sounded old-fashioned.

In 1998, on the death of author Francis Durbridge, the BBC broadcast a radio documentary about Paul Temple written and presented by Jeffrey Richards, entitled ''Send For Paul Temple'' (aired on 20 May 1998), which included extracts from surviving recordings held in the BBC Sound Archive such as the first ever serial in 1938.

List of radio serials

Film adaptations

Between 1946 and 1952, Paul Temple appeared in four feature films, each an abridged version of one of the early (hence, now lost) BBC radio serials. These films were distributed by Butcher's Film Service based in the North of England. All were made in the years ''before'' Peter Coke was cast as the definitive Paul Temple in the radio series in 1954. Marjorie Westbury ''had'' been established in the radio series by this point, but was not cast in these films because she was not a film actress.

* 1946 '' Send for Paul Temple'' (abridged remake of the radio serial of the same name) with Anthony Hulme (1910–2007) (born Harry Idris Miller) as Temple, Joy Shelton as Steve and Maire O'Neill as Mrs Neddy.
* 1948 ''Calling Paul Temple'' (abridged remake of radio serial ''Send for Paul Temple Again'') with John Bentley as Temple and Dinah Sheridan as Steve.
* 1950 ''Paul Temple's Triumph'' (abridged remake of radio serial ''News of Paul Temple'') with John Bentley as Temple and Dinah Sheridan as Steve.
* 1952 '' Paul Temple Returns'' (abridged remake of radio serial ''Paul Temple Intervenes'') with John Bentley as Temple and Patricia Dainton as Steve. It was also released under the alternative title ''Bombay Waterfront''.

BBC television series

Francis Durbridge licensed the television rights in his characters to the BBC
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