Rumpole of the Bailey (TV Series)

Rumpole and the Old Boy Net (1983)

Leo McKern: Horace Rumpole

Quotes 

• Horace Rumpole : You can bet your dear old hair shirt there's going to be an argument!

• Henry : Mr Bernard rang, sir. He wants a con today in the Bawdy House case. R v Lee.

  Horace Rumpole : Keep thy foot out of brothels, Henry. Those places are far more entertaining to litigate about than to visit.

• [Rumpole is defending a couple who are accused of keeping a brothel and blackmailing their clients. He approaches Ballard who is prosecuting, to see if he would be amenable to dropping the blackmail charge if his clients plead guilty to "keeping a house of ill-repute". Ballard refuses indignantly] 

  Samuel Ballard, Q.C. : [cynically]  "Blessed are the blackmailers, for they shall walk out without a stain on their characters"? Is that your version of the Sermon on the Mount, Rumpole?

  Horace Rumpole : "Prisons are built with stones of law, brothels with bricks of religion" - that's William Blake. I'll give you another quotation: "I come not to call the righteous but the sinners to repentence" - Matthew 9, verse 13.

• [Rumpole suspects, but cannot prove, that Fiona Allways may have been the person who passed "Mr X's" name to TV journalist Isobel Vincent. He wonders whether he may be called upon to defend Isobel in her Contempt of Court case] 

  Horace Rumpole : [to Fiona]  I don't know about you, but martyrs make me exceedingly nervous.