The Dock Brief The Dock Brief The Dock Brief (US title Trial and Error) is a 1962 black-and-white British legal satire directed by James Hill, starring Peter Sellers and Richard Attenborough, and based on the play of the same name written by John Mortimer (creator of Horace Rumpole). The film had its world premiere on 20 September 1962 at the Plaza Theatre in London's West End. Richard Attenborough was nominated for the 1963 BAFTA Award for best British actor for his role. In a cell under the Old Bailey, two men meet. One is Wilfred Morgenhall, an unmarried barrister who never gets any
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