Paul Temple

Paul Temple is a fictional character, created by English writer Francis Durbridge (1912–1998). Temple is a professional author of crime fiction and an amateur private detective. Together with his journalist wife Louise, affectionately known as Steve after her pen name "Steve Trent", he solves whodunnit crimes through subtle, humorously articulated deduction. Always the gentleman, the strongest oath he ever utters is "by Timothy".

Created for the BBC radio serial Send for Paul Temple in 1938, the Temples have featured in over 30 BBC radio dramas, 12 serials for German radio, a BBC television series, four British feature films, and several novels. A Paul Temple comic strip ran in the London Evening News from the mid-1950s to the early 1960s.

Protagonist

Paul Temple is professional novelist, and while he possesses no formal training as a detective, his background constructing crime plots allows him to apply deductive reasoning to solve cases that have eluded Scotland Yard.

Deduction didn't take place in the manner of Sherlock Holmes. Events simply unfolded, and people (all the suspects in the case) were met and spoken to informally by Temple, rather than being arrested and formally interviewed by the police, and in the meanwhile Temple dodged bombs and bullets as the suspects sought to hamper him. But all the threads would come together in the final episode, where Temple would arrange a drinks party, or similar event, at which the villain would be unmasked. Finally, Paul, Steve and Sir Graham Forbes would hold a post mortem, which would explain why certain events in the serial had taken place, which of them had been red herrings, and which had been genuine clues.

Works

Original radio serials

The Paul Temple character originated in British radio, across several BBC serials broadcast from the 1930s to the 1960s. While several actors and actresses portrayed the Temples over the years, the best known portrayal of the couple was by Peter Coke and Marjorie Westbury. The introductory and closing music for the majority of the long-running BBC radio series was Coronation Scot (a musical depiction of a train journey) composed by Vivian Ellis; the earliest serials, those aired prior to December 1947, used an excerpt from Scheherazade by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.

Most of the surviving serials starring Coke and Westbury have been repeated since 2003 by digital radio station BBC Radio 7 (now called 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.

Many of the early radio serials have not survived the passage of time. In August 2006 BBC Radio 4 broadcast a new 8-part production recreating one of these lost early serials, Paul Temple and the Sullivan Mystery, which had aired in 1947; Crawford Logan starred as Paul Temple with Gerda Stevenson as Steve (in place of the original leads, Kim Peacock and Marjorie Westbury), in a mono production employing vintage microphones and sound effects. A new production of The Madison Mystery followed between May and July 2008, and a remake of the 1947 serial Paul Temple and Steve aired in June and July 2010. A remake of A Case for Paul Temple began transmission on 24 August 2011, and was released on CD in October 2011. In early 2013, the BBC re-recorded Paul Temple and the Gregory Affair, which they broadcast later that year and released on CD. Many of these remakes featured Welsh character actor Gareth Thomas as the head of Scotland Yard.

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 made a radio documentary about Paul Temple written by noted authority Professor Jeffrey Richards, entitled Send For Paul Temple (aired on May 20th, 1998), which included extracts from surviving recordings held in the BBC sound archives going right back to the first ever serial in 1938.^[1]

Film adaptations

Between 1946 and 1952 Paul Temple appeared in four feature films distributed by Butcher's Film Service (a film distributor based in the North of England, which also distributed films in the Old Mother Riley series of Northern comedies).

• 1946 Send for Paul Temple 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 (based on Send for Paul Temple Again) with John Bentley as Temple and Dinah Sheridan as Steve.
• 1950 Paul Temple's Triumph (based on News of Paul Temple) with John Bentley as Temple and Dinah Sheridan as Steve.
• 1952 Paul Temple Returns (based on Paul Temple Intervenes) with John Bentley as Temple and Patricia Dainton as Steve. It was also released with the alternative title Bombay Waterfront.

BBC television series

Francis Durbridge licensed the character to the BBC, which from 1969 to 1971 made 52 episodes of Paul Temple on television, in colour, with each episode running 50 minutes. It starred Francis Matthews as Paul Temple, co-starring Ros Drinkwater as his wife Steve, with George Sewell as Sammy Carson.

The 52 episodes, made over 4 seasons, were co-produced with West German television station ZDF, making it the very first international co-production of the TV era, thereby rendering it practicable to film location scenes for the series in West Germany. The co-produced episodes were dubbed into German, using German voice artists, for broadcast by ZDF in West Germany.

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 (for the other 5, only black and white telerecordings survive); the other 36 episodes are lost. Many of the missing episodes survive in colour in ZDF TV's archives in Germany, but with dubbed German soundtracks.

The theme tune of the television series was composed by Ron Grainer, who composed very many tv themes for the BBC during the 1960s.

Novels

Many of the British Paul Temple radio serials were novelized by Francis Durbridge between 1938 and 1989. Some of the novels in which the character appears were written in collaboration with John Thewes, Douglas Rutherford or Charles Hatten – and those with Rutherford were even published under the pen-name "Paul Temple", thus making the fictional writer a "real" one.

• Send for Paul Temple (1938), Anthony Head (2007)*
• Paul Temple and the Front Page Men (1939), Anthony Head (2009)*
• News of Paul Temple (1940), Anthony Head (2008)*
• Paul Temple Intervenes (1944), Toby Stephens (2011)*
• Send for Paul Temple Again! (1948)
• The Tyler Mystery (1957), Anthony Head (2006)*
• East of Algiers (1959), Anthony Head (2009)* - based on the Sullivan Mystery but with locations and character names altered
• Paul Temple and the Harkdale Robbery (1970), Anthony Head (2007)*
• Paul Temple and the Kelby Affair (1970), Anthony Head (2007)*
• The Geneva Mystery (1971), Toby Stephens (2011)*
• The Curzon Case (1972), Anthony Head (2006)*
• Paul Temple and the Margot Mystery (1986), Toby Stephens (2011)
• Paul Temple and the Madison Case (1988)
• Paul Temple and the Conrad Case (1989)

(*) Indicates also released as an audiobook on CD, read by Anthony Head or Toby Stephens

Commercial releases

All the complete surviving Paul Temple UK radio serials have been released on CD by the BBC Radio Collection, as has the 1940 Canadian remake of Send for Paul Temple.

The 11 surviving colour episodes of the BBC-TV version of "Paul Temple" featuring Francis Matthews and Ros Drinkwater were released on DVD on 6 July 2009 by Acorn Media UK. A further 5 Black and White episodes were released in April 2012. Many unreleased colour episodes still exist in the archives of ZDF, the series' German co-producer, with soundtrack in German.

In 2010 Renown Pictures Ltd, new owners of The Butchers Library, released on DVD the feature films Send For Paul Temple, Paul Temple Returns (a.k.a. Bombay Waterfront) and Calling Paul Temple.^[14]

In 2011 a box set of all four Paul Temple movies was released in November. The film Paul Temple's Triumph was released singly, initially to Renown Club members only, in March 2012. It has since become generally available.

In 2016 and February 2017 all the existing Paul Temple radio serials up to 1968 will be released in 3 box sets, including the 1960 remake of The Gilbert Affair and the Kim Peacock 1950 version of The Van Dyke Affair.

International adaptations

Netherlands

In the Netherlands several of the radio plays were recorded with Dutch actors and with the main character's name translated to 'Paul Vlaanderen '.

Germany

In Germany, 12 Paul Temple radio serials were adapted between 1949 and 1967, each episode (in common with the BBC serials) ending with a cliffhanger. They were listened to by such huge numbers of people that they earned the sobriquet Straßenfeger ("street sweepers"), because they left the streets practically deserted whenever an episode was broadcast. They were performed by actors of national renown, including Luxembourg-born René Deltgen (who played the title role in 11 of the 12 series), Gustav Knuth, Friedrich W. Bauschulte, Pinkas Braun, Heinz Schimmelpfennig, Siegfried Wischnewski, Wolfgang Wahl, Günther Ungeheuer and Paul Klinger amongst others.

All 11 surviving German radio serials have since been released on CD as audiobooks. Two short-lived comic series by the Aachener Bildschriftenverlag and the Luna-Kriminalromane are rare collector's items.

In 2014, an abridged remake of the lost 1949 version of "Paul Temple and the Gregory Affair" was aired and released, followed by a live radio show in 2015 with the cast and the WDR Radio Orchestra, hosted by German Comedian Bastian Pastewka.

In 2015, all four Paul Temple feature films were released on DVD.

References

1. ↑ http://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/bc672a8f1ba743d59bf1562277dccf2f
2. 1 2 Paul Temple: The Radio Shows, The Original Old Time Radio WWW Pages
3. ↑ Remade in 1968 with Peter Coke and Marjorie Westbury, as Paul Temple and the Alex Affair
4. ↑ Remade in 2011 starring Crawford Logan
5. ↑ Remade in 2013 starring Crawford Logan
6. ↑ Remade in 2010 starring Crawford Logan
7. ↑ Remade in 2006 starring Crawford Logan
8. ↑ The rumour that recordings of this serial have been found is entirely false. It arose when an American collector heard a recording of the BBC's 2006 re-make of this lost serial.
9. ↑ Remade in 2008 starring Crawford Logan
10. ↑ Peter Coke, who in 1954 took over the lead role, had a small part in this serial
11. ↑ Remade in 1963 with Peter Coke and Marjorie Westbury
12. ↑ Remade in 2008 starring Crawford Logan
13. ↑ Remake of Send for Paul Temple Again, with the name of the villain changed from "Rex" to "Alex"
14. ↑ Renown Pictures Limited

External links

• The Paul Temple File
• Francis Durbridge Homepage: Paul Temple (Radio, TV, Books) (German)
• Paul Temple
• Anthony Hulme Obituary