Rumpole and the Quacks

It is not always the law courts for barristers. They also appear in front of regulatory boards defending lawyers, accountants and doctors accused of misconduct.

Rumpole is representing the urbane Dr Ghulam Rahmat (Saeed Jaffrey) who has been accused of inappropriately touching up his patient. An attractive young female who works as a nanny and turned up with a sore throat.

Meanwhile Phyllida Erskine-Brown is disturbed. Her husband Claude has got a pupil, although she is a much older woman taking up law later in life. Phyllida also finds a contact magazine where a barrister is looking for companionship. She is inflamed.

Rumpole too finds some interesting information in the same contact magazine. The nanny also advertises her escort services.

Dr Rahmat had a run in with the senior partner in the practice Dr Cogger. Rahmat was of the opinion that Cogger was too happy to prescribe expensive pills and too keen on inducements from certain pharmaceutical reps. It might just be that Dr Cogger had set up Dr Rahmat.

The episode is not without its problems. It has several false and hollow notes.

I can buy Dr Rahmat as a posh public school educated man from a post colonial India. That type still exists in India and Jaffrey had played those sorts before.

I just cannot buy that Dr Rahmat wanted to make an omelette without breaking any eggs. It transpires that he knew Cogger had set him up but wanted the matter dealt without humiliating anyone.

Dr Rahmat knew about the nanny and persuaded her to own up at the hearing. In exchange Rahmat was going to marry her.

I find it hard to fathom that Dr Rahmat would be so sanguine. When he is at risk of being struck off as a doctor, his professional reputation in tatters, forced to marry an escort all because of a greedy and vindictive colleague who Rahmat is happy to maintain cordial relations with.

At the end it was not Rumple who got Rahmat off but the client did his own defence.

There was a theme about the novel A Passage to India in this episode. Many viewers at the time would had been familiar with the basic story. It had been made into an Oscar winning film by David Lean a few years earlier.

Also Phyllida's story was weak. We have seen her flirt with other barristers in the past while still married to Claude. You just know that the barrister in the contact ad was never going to be Claude Erskine-Brown.

Much better if Claude and Phyllida had met as two bored lonely hearts. It would have been the Pina Colada song come to life.

This episode has Rumpole (Leo McKern) successfully defending an Indian doctor (Saeed Jaffray) accused of molesting one of his patients. During the case, Rumpole enjoys making a monkey out of the judge (Graham Crowden), and outwitting his younger lawyer Phyllida Erskine-Brown (Patricia Hodge). Once again we admire Mortimer's dry humor as he shows the absurdities of the legal profession, although there is perhaps rather too much of the 'comic Indian' person about Jaffray's character. On several occasions he comes across as a quasi-colonial figure of the outwardly polite, submissive person who apparently accepts everything that his (white) lawyers say, but eventually succeeds in outwitting them. The experience of watching the episode today prompts us to think - or at least hope - that such representations have been successfully consigned to the scriptwriters' mausoleum.