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 separated. The play features a character, Leonard Hoskins (played by John Nettleton), a divorce lawyer with a domineering mother, who can be seen as an early prototype of Horace Rumpole. In the mid-1970s, Mortimer approached BBC producer Irene Shubik, who had overseen "Infidelity Took Place" and who was now one of the two producers overseeing "Play For Today" – the successor series to "The Wednesday Play" as the BBC's strand for contemporary drama. Mortimer presented an idea for a new play, titled "My Darling Prince, Peter Kropotkin", that centred on a barrister called Horace Rumbold. Rumbold would have a particular