First viewed : 15 September 1986
This was a flawed but interesting ten part serial which my mother enjoyed more than I did although I stuck with it. It was written by John Mortimer. Mortimer was a genuine polymath, a prominent barrister who also wrote copiously after working in a wartime propaganda unit and achieved success in both fields. As a lawyer he achieved prominence in a number of obscenity trials such as the Oz trial and then the Never Mind The Bollocks Case. As a writer he came to the fore through TV in the late seventies as the creator of Rumpole of the Bailey. In the eighties, he took on a third role as an arch-critic of the Thatcher government, using his public profile to hector the electorate about the iniquities of Tory policies . These harangues, not helped by his personal likeness to a supercilious toad, did the socialist cause more harm than good.
Paradise Postponed was a lament for the decline of post-war idealism which demonstrated a degree of self-knowledge not immediately apparent in his public appearances. Like Bleak House , the story rested on an inheritance issue. Why did Simeon Simcox ( Michael Hordern ) a socialist vicar in East Anglia but cushioned by the wealth from shares in a family brewery leave those shares to a locally-born Tory Cabinet minister Leslie Titmus ( David Threlfall ) ? Most interested in solving that mystery are his disinherited sons , Henry ( Peter Egan ) , a self-interested writer long since moved to the right and Fred ( Paul Shelley ) a liberal but rather indolent doctor. The story unfolds mainly in flashbacks illustrating the changes in social attitudes since the days of Attlee.
The main flaws were twofold. Firstly, a rather mechanical plot relying too much on Arthur Nubble ( Kenny Ireland ) , Fred's entrepreneurial old schoolfriend periodically popping up with a revelation to move it forward. The great secret becomes obvious well before the final episode. The other was that Mortimer tried to cram in too much social commentary so that characters often became mouthpieces for his themes. I still cringe at the memory of Henry's scene with his daughter Francesca ( Leonie Mellinger ) where she goes into a rant about how unidealistic she is, concluding with "And I don't give a damn about great stinking whales !"
Threlfall had already caught the eye in Nicholas Nickleby and The Gathering Seed but it was Titmus that made his name as an actor, transforming from a gauche provincial nobody to a smooth-talking ,high-ranking politician with the aid of the Radio 3 cricket commentary. There was much interested speculation in the papers about who Titmus might be based on. Norman Tebbit was an obvious candidate but Peter Walker was also mentioned a lot. Mortimer was pretty fair to Titmus. He gets where he is by hard work and determination and though his marriage to volatile Charlie ( Zoe Wanamaker ) is politically advantageous , he does treat her with genuine care and affection. He is clearly morally superior to the local Tory old guard that despise him.
Mortimer went on to write a sequel, Titmus Regained , a less ambitious three parter in 1991 which I didn't see. Apart from Threlfall, I think only Paul Shelley returned from the original cast. It didn't have anything like the same impact. Rumpole of the Bailey finished on TV in the following year ( although he was resurrected on radio in the noughties ). Mortimer's star then dimmed, particularly after the death of Labour leader John Smith in 1994. His successor Tony Blair regarded the "Labour luvvies " in the entertainment industry as an electoral embarrassment and froze them out. Mortimer continued to write, mainly about Rumpole, until his death in 2009.
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