Decoding the Temples

BBC7 have been re-running another Paul Temple radio mystery from the 1950s, this one entitled The Gilbert Case. I am an avid listener, though it took me a bit of time to figure out why. The plots are not exactly memorable; when I manage to retain them at all, they tend to run together so thoroughly in my mind that I cannot reconstruct a single one. In fact the main mysterious element, as far as I'm concerned, arises every time the BBC re-runs one of them, and I have to figure out whether I've heard that particular one before or merely listened to half a dozen others with almost identical titles and story lines. Dora tells me she feels much the same about most of the jokes I tell.

At the end of nearly every series, we discover that the bad guys are foreigners, usually European ones, and the bad stuff they do involves drugs. It's not clear that the author, Francis Durbridge, actually knew anything at all about drugs except that they were generally dangerous, always immoral, and in the final analysis not very clever. Exactly the same remarks could be made about his opinion of foreigners, though it's also possible that the reason he put so many of them into his stories was merely to give Paul and his intrepid wife an excuse for frequent glamorous international travel at a time when few of his audience could have dreamed of ever affording it for themselves.

It is Paul's wife who intrigues me the most, though. In some ways she epitomizes the ideal feminine stereotype of the 1950s: beautiful, unfailingly well-mannered, never moody or unreasonable, and frequently quite resourceful in a high-heeled sort of way. But despite that, it's not ultimately clear why Paul bothers with her. While he holds down two jobs (private detective and fiction writer) to support the couple's lavish lifestyle, she never does a stroke of work, spending most of her time in clothes shops and at the hairdresser. And in one important respect she departs from the fifties ideal: she never displays the least propensity to bear her husband any children. So what is she there for?

A clue can, perhaps, be found in her name: Steve. Is she all that she seems? Back then it would of course not have been at all OK to live openly as a gay couple. What better way, then, to circumvent the narrow mindedness of the times than for one member of the partnership to live as a woman in every respect except the obvious biologically impossible one. Especially since "Steve" so clearly enjoys dressing up.

On reflection, Durbridge may in fact be a master of the meta-narrative. After listening to a few near-identical runs of the same basic material, one's mind is almost forced to pay attention at another level, like a Zen meditator who stares for hours at the same blank wall. Are there further surprises in store for the discerning listener? I shall replay my recordings of Paul Temple And The Gregory/Sullivan/Vandyke/Jonathan/Margo Mystery/Case/Affair (delete as appropriate) and see what other intriguing patterns may emerge from the paintwork.