Paradise Postponed Paradise Postponed Paradise Postponed (1986) is a British 11-episode TV serial based on a novel by writer John Mortimer. He had adapted "Brideshead Revisited" as a film and wrote "Rumpole of the Bailey." The series covered a span of 30 years of postwar British history, set in a small village. The series explores the mystery of why Reverend Simeon Simcox, a "wealthy Socialist rector", bequeathed the millions of the Simcox brewery estate to Leslie Titmuss, a city developer and Conservative cabinet minister. Simeon's sons Fred, a jazz-drumming country doctor and Henry, once Britain's brightest and angriest writer who now works
Rumpole of the Bailey Rumpole says he is 64 years old, suggesting a birthdate of 1910 (although Leo McKern, the actor who played Rumpole, was born in 1920). Rumpole's "Oxford Book of English Verse" is inscribed "Horace Rumpole, Little Wicks School 1923. Cursed be he who steals this book," (Series 4 – 1987); in "Rumpole and the Fascist Beast" it is mentioned that he studied at Birkenshaw School, as he calls it 'a wind-blasted penal colony on the Norfolk coast'; he bought his barrister's wig in 1932; first appeared in court in 1937; first met Hilda on 14 August 1938; served in the RAF