The tap end! Mortimer may have been wrong!

[blah blah]

Mortimer talks about a case where he didn't know how to defend a husband who almost drowned his wife in the bath, as they shared it. However, when he mentions to the judge, in passing, that the husband sat at the tap end, the judge is horrified. He is even more angered at the wife when he discovers that she always made him sit at the tap end, and lets the husband off, or gives him a small sentence. Mortimer says he assumed that Mrs. Judge always sat at the tap end. Perhaps, but he could have been wrong. What if Mr Judge, just like the client, was forced to sit at the tap end, by a woman like She who must Obeyed? Perhaps finding for the husband was a way to vent his anger at his wife, and all women, by letting this man, in the same position off. This leads to Rumpole and the Tap End, where Featherstone is the judge in question, and he gets into political trouble for mentioning it in open court. Though Mrs. Frobisher puts their client in danger with her activism against her client. Ironically I recently saw a show with a tube where the tap was on the corner, so no one was against the tap. Progress...

I would not want to see Rumpole redone by HBO or anyone else. No one will be better than Leo Mckern, or the original Hilda (not from pilot), or any of the ensemble characters. The shows covered all the stories, I think, and done well, especially early ones. I would be OK with a movie or two of young Rumpole doing the penge bungalow murders, and the early, big forgery case he talks of, but I wouldn't want a new Rumpole f***ing up the old. Just like I didn't need a new Star Wars destroying the charm of the original. A masterpiece of Optical Printing destroyed by endless Computer manipulation. This would destroy a substantive masterpiece with new and unwanted writing, and lesser, inaccurate acting. The old show was made when the writer was alive, why remake it now that he's dead? Maybe Rumpole is missing to much CGI.

Sometimes when something is great the best thing to do is to leave it alone, and enjoy it for what it is, otherwise, you can only destroy it.

[kk2...@gmail.com]

I agree. Another example of something ruined is the 'updated, improved" Miss Marples. More violence, more sex, much less intelligence. Nothing personal agin' the actress who played the lead, but there was no equal to Joan Hickson, whom Agatha Christie herself chose to play Miss M in thirty years' time . Amazing prescient of her.

[kk2...@gmail.com]

On Tuesday, September 6, 2016 at 12:25:40 AM UTC-6, blah blah wrote:

So-o, is there a plot afoot to re-make Rumpole?! Seriously?!

[Kate Killebrew]

On Tuesday, September 6, 2016 at 12:25:40 AM UTC-6, blah blah wrote:

A reply to an old post, to try to revive this group, now that there are so many renditions of Rumpole on AUdible and Audiobooks.

I agree with everything that blah blah has said except for one thing: I think that the final Hilda, Marion Mathie, was by far the best Hilda. She best epitomized the bitterness and bitchiness of Hilda, She Who Must Be Obeyed, who married Horace as a way to climb to be Wife of the Head of Chambers, and probably because she had no other suitors, or any that she mentioned or that surfaced in the stories.