I was addened to read about the deaths of both these men. Patrick McGoohan was someone who was willing to play the action hero, but not in conventional ways and it was that which lead him towards helping to create, and play the lead, in The Prisoner.
Sir John Mortimer was a fine author. Indeed he had a way of getting inside the skin of the anti-heroes in his books with a certain degree of empathy, but still with sharp criticism (see Leslie Titmuss) , which makes it easy to see how he made a good barrister.
But it was for his creation of Horace Rumpole that he will be most remembered. The barrister who always stood for the defence, who calmly stood for justice and faced down many opponents, but lived in some trepidation of his beloved wife Hilda (otherwise known affectionatley as "She Who Must Be Obeyed!").
Both men much missed, and who made life a little more exciting.
2 comments:
John Mortimer actively supported barbaric bloodsports and was one of the public figures who backed the odious Countryside Alliance.
He represented a particularly nasty strain of public life in this country who think that chasing wild animals to exhaustion before disemboweling them with a pack of dogs was all jolly nice.
All those who fight against sadism in the name of 'sport' will not be mourning.
Well I didn't know about his views on bloodsports
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