Rumpole of the Bailey (radio series) Rumpole of the Bailey (radio series) Rumpole of the Bailey is a radio series created and written by the British writer and barrister John Mortimer based on the television series "Rumpole of the Bailey". Five different actors portrayed Horace Rumpole in these episodes: Leo McKern, Maurice Denham, Timothy West, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Julian Rhind-Tutt. Since 1980 there were a number of different BBC radio productions derived from the Rumpole stories. Essentially there were two different series and three Christmas specials – yielding a grand total of 40 episodes. Some were new radio adaptations of scripts previously produced for TV; some
Rumpole of the Bailey an age of around 70 years, and past events in his life have been retconned to fit each story's time frame. Thus, in the books published in 1996 and before, he proposed to Hilda in 1938, and in books published in 2003 and after, it appears that he neither became a barrister nor met Hilda until after World War II ended in 1945. "Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders", containing his first unled case and his engagement to Hilda, takes place in the early 1950s, entirely inconsistent with the early stories. Since 1988, when Phyllida Erskine-Brown became a QC and