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. Always surviving these, Temple would arrange a cocktail party or similar social event at which he unmasked the perpetrator. In many of the serials, the perpetrator in question had been operating under an assumed name, as the mastermind of complex criminal operations in the shadows while meeting Temple openly under their true identity.
At the end of each tale, Paul, Steve and Sir Graham Forbes of Scotland Yard 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. 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 series of BBC Radio serials broadcast between 1938 and 1968, with various actors portraying the Temples. In the initial post-war period the detective was played by a succession of different actors: Barry Morse, Howard Marion-Crawford and Kim Peacock. The longest-running team, and the most popular with audiences, was Peter Coke and Marjorie Westbury, who starred together in every serial made between 1954 and 1968; Westbury had held the role of Steve since 1945.
The supporting characters of Sir Graham Forbes and the Temples' cockney butler Charlie were also repeatedly recast. Lester Mudditt was the longest lasting Sir Graham, playing the part from 1939 to 1958. He was replaced by Richard Williams,, then James Thomason. Gareth Thomas of Blake's 7 fame essayed the role for the Crawford Logan-Gerda Stevenson remakes.
The radio series was a collaboration between writer Francis Durbridge and BBC producer Martyn C Webster, both of whom worked on all of the Paul Temple 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 a proposal for a mystery series about a gentleman detective.
Initially the serials were broadcast only on the Midlands transmitters of the BBC's pre-war Regional service. As they gained in popularity, they aired nationally on the newly created Home Service. However, in 1945 they found a new permanent home on the Light Programme, another national service, where they remained until the final serial in 1968. The introductory and closing music for the majority of the serials was Coronation Scot, composed by Vivian Ellis, although the earliest serials used an excerpt from Scheherazade by Rimsky-Korsakov. Repeats of some serials were heard on the successor to the Home Service, Radio 4, during the 1980s, and as late as 1992.
Many of the earliest serials, in which the eponymous hero was played by many different 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 Marjorie 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. In 2005 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 documentary 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 was Paul Temple and the Gregory Affair, aired in 2013. Many of these new productions featured Welsh actor Gareth Thomas as Sir Graham Forbes, 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. Interviewed in 2005, 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, which featured extracts from surviving recordings held in the BBC Sound Archive including from the first ever serial in 1938, and a new interview with Peter Coke.

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 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.
Francis Durbridge licensed the television rights in his characters to the BBC, who between 1969 and 1971 produced a drama series entitled Paul Temple. It starred Francis Matthews as Paul Temple, and co-starred Ros Drinkwater as his wife Steve. None of the television scripts were written by Durbridge and the stories are set in the 70s and lack the period charm of the radio stories.
The 52 episodes, made over 4 seasons, were co-produced with ZDF, a West German television station based in Munich. This made it practicable, in terms of the show's budget, to film location scenes for the series overseas. The episodes were subsequently dubbed into German, using German voice artists, for broadcast by ZDF to German audiences.
Only 16 of the 52 episodes currently exist in the BBC's television archive with their original English soundtrack, and only 11 of these are in colour. Seasons 2-4 survive, in colour, in archives in Germany, but with dubbed German soundtracks. The 11 colour episodes are available on DVD.
The theme tune of the television series was composed by Ron Grainer.

Novels

Many of the BBC Paul Temple radio serials were novelised between 1938 and 1989 by Francis Durbridge working with collaborators from his original scripts. The first was Send for Paul Temple with John Thewes. 'Thewes' is thought to have been a pseudonym for Charles Hatton, with whom Durbridge collaborated on the following four Temple novelisations up until 1948. All of these were rapidly adapted from the original scripts in order to capitalise on the popularity of the radio serial. Publicity for Send for Paul Temple described it as "the novel of the thriller that created a BBC fan-mail record". Durbridge used a co-author because he regarded himself as a writer of dialogue, a scriptwriter rather than a novelist. The two novels with Douglas Rutherford appeared under the pen name 'Paul Temple'. The Tyler Mystery is unusual in giving Temple's wife Steve a more central role. East of Algiers was partly based on the 1947 radio serial Paul Temple and the Sullivan Mystery. From The Kelby Affair on the novels are credited to Francis Durbridge alone.
  1. Send for Paul Temple
  2. Paul Temple and the Front Page Men
  3. News of Paul Temple
  4. Paul Temple Intervenes
  5. Send for Paul Temple Again!
  6. Paul Temple and the Tyler Mystery
  7. Paul Temple: East of Algiers
  8. Paul Temple and the Kelby Affair
  9. Paul Temple and the Harkdale Robbery
  10. Paul Temple and the Geneva Mystery
  11. Paul Temple and the Curzon Case
  12. Paul Temple and the Margo Mystery
  13. Paul Temple and the Madison Case
  14. ''Paul Temple and the Conrad Case''