Starting in the mid 1970s, there was a British TV series called Rumpole of the Bailey, which was about a barrister named Rumpole. It was a bit of a courtroom drama and a bit of a comedy. Rumpole was a highly skilled barrister who had a tendency to quote the poetry of Wadsworth and to wax occasionally philosophical. My father used to watch it, when I was a child, and I recently had a hankering for it.

Here’s the first episode ever made:

The actor, Leo McKern, did a fantastic job. He really sold the character, and gave him an outsized amount of vivacity. It’s easy to be quite taken with Rumpole.

Until you watch a full episode or two.

Rumpole is not a good man. The writer, John Mortimer, who was a barrister and from his biography on Wikipedia not a good man either, plays a trick that I’ve seen a fair amount in nihilistic works: putting in little tidbits that suggest that Rumpole is a good man in order to keep the audience going.

To give an example: in the third episode, Rumpole has successfully defended a woman on a major drug charge by impugning the evidence against her, but the case adjourns for lunch before the charge can be dismissed and during that adjournment she tells Rumpole that she did in fact buy the drugs. Once she has told him that she is guilty, he can no longer defend her and only advise her to enter a guilty plea. There’s a scene where he explains this to her, but rather than saying that he is morally obligated to be truthful, he says that the book containing the barrister code of ethics is his religion.

I’ve grown to rather despise this kind of trick, of suggesting that the character has principles only to pull the rug out and have him say that he doesn’t, but always in a way that it’s just possible to doubt. Except that there is also the clear evidence that he doesn’t really have principles. In the first episode, there’s the issue of his son who he has raised spectacularly badly. So badly, it’s clear that he never tried—a point his son makes by pointing out that at age seven he was sent away from home to various boarding schools and never really knew his parents after. In the third episode, Rumpole (a married man) more-or-less accepts sexual bribery from his client in order to stay on the case when he wants to leave after she confessed to the crime.

I was strung along for about four seasons of the show House by this same basic trick, until I finally figured out that Dr. House was, in fact, the villain of the show.

It’s a great pity because Rumpole could easily have been a really good show. It did not depend on the poor character of Horace Rumpole for anything that made it good.