The run
- Network
- BBC
- Years active
- 1930–1960
- Surviving broadcasts
- 8
- Genre
- detective
I have great affection for this 1942 Temple: wonderful music, Carl Bernard's and Bernadette Hodgson's exquisite pronunciation, and lots of theatrical fun. “Carl Bernard stars as Paul Temple and Bernadette Hodgson as his wife Steve. From 1938 to 1969, the fictional crime novelist and detective Paul Temple, together with his "Fleet Street" journalist wife Steve, solved case after case in one of BBC radio's most popular series. They inhabited a sophisticated world of chilled cocktails and fast cars, where the women were chic and the men wore cravats - a world where Sir Graham Forbes, of Scotland Yard, usually needed Paul's help with his latest tricky case.” There are pitifully few British or BB Public-domain transfers from the Internet Archive.
Source collection
Internet Archive audio collections
Rights
Public domain — no renewed US copyright
Cataloguing
Air dates and notes from the Archive item record
The shape of the run
What survives, year by year
3 dated broadcasts across 97 years on the air, with 96 years where nothing is known to survive. Brightness is transfer quality; empty cells are months lost to time.
Episodes
Start here
Listen to the run in order
Restored broadcasts from 2026, in original transmission order.
- 1. Signal at Midnight · 16 Jun 2026
- 2. The Last Train Out · 23 Jun 2026
- 3. Night Broadcast · 30 Jun 2026
A Room Above the Street
4 Aug 2026 · 34 min
The episode listeners keep sending to people who never listen to podcasts.
The Long Silence
28 Jul 2026 · 49 min
A quiet beginning that turns, halfway through, into something else entirely.
Dead Air
21 Jul 2026 · 1h 4m
The one everybody argues about.
Sign Off
14 Jul 2026 · 27 min
Short, complete and unexpectedly devastating.
The Case of the Missing Hour
7 Jul 2026 · 42 min
The episode listeners keep sending to people who never listen to podcasts.
Night Broadcast
30 Jun 2026 · 57 min
We go back to the beginning and read everything again.
The Last Train Out
23 Jun 2026 · 20 min
Three interviews, one archive reel, and a question nobody wanted asked.
Signal at Midnight
16 Jun 2026 · 35 min
Recorded on location, with the room left in.
Also on BBC
BBC in 1930–1960
Other series the network carried while Paul Temple was on the air.
Same seasons
detective on the air then
Series in the same genre whose runs overlapped this one.
What it became
The private eye at the microphone
First-person narration, a case that walks in the door, and a city that talks back. Marlowe, Sam Spade and Johnny Dollar turned detection into a listening form.
Lineage is written by our editors, not inferred from listening data.
Descendants
Working in the tradition of Paul Temple
Modern series carrying this form forward.
If you liked this
More to explore
Chosen by the same editors.
