Week 9

I suppose it’s worthwhile pointing out that Dr. Login—the real Dr. Login of history—never ran an asylum, as far as I’m aware, and that Twickenham’s Cole Park Grange and the Jolly Boatman are figments of my imagination. In a sense they’re an homage to Francis Durbridge’s Paul Temple, which I avidly followed in its weekly radio installments throughout my teenage years.

Practically every story included a doctor, who nearly always ran an asylum on the outskirts of London. At first, the doctor seemed benign, but then you quickly realized that he (or, occasionally, she) was mixed up in some very dodgy business, and in it well beyond his or her depth. If the doctor was a woman, she always had an exotic name and spoke with an undisclosed accent—Greek or Lebanese, perhaps; something middle-eastern. Male doctors, on the other hand, spoke with middle-European accents. They were either Austrian, Hungarian, or—at a pinch—Czech.

Some years ago the BBC released the surviving Paul Temple mysteries—and there are surprisingly few—as CD sets. By a stroke of luck, I discovered them in my local library. They were as fantastic as I remember them. They also launched new radio productions based on a couple of original scripts. Despite the loving care lavished on them by the actors, the director, and the sound team, they were only partially successful in recreating that extraordinary sound-world I remember from my childhood.

Fascinating Paul Temple trivia: Marjorie Westbury, the actress who played Paul Temple’s long-suffering wife Steve, had the most wonderful sultry voice, one that conjured up the pinnacle of a tall, elegant sophisticate. In reality she was a short (four foot ten), stout-ish woman, who, on account of her voice, received regular offers of marriage. She even received a legacy from a listener who died and left her a small fortune.

Till next week,
Michael


Michael Gallagher’s Gooseberry is serialized in weekly installments every Friday from July 4th 2014 on Goodreads. Michael Gallagher is the author of The Bridge of Dead Things and The Scarab Heart, as well as the popular non-fiction title Why the Victorians Saw Ghosts.

Photograph: The Independent Shoe Black by John Thomson, used courtesy of the London School of Economics’ Digital Library under a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 licence.