In this version of the story, the summing-up of Mr. Justice Marshall seems to take only a few sentences, after which Stephen Ward, in despair, elects to kill himself. In fact, the summing-up went on for several days. It was on the evening of the third day that Ward took a fatal barbiturate overdose, and the summing-up was not then complete; the judge continued the next day as Ward lay comatose in hospital.
This episode sees the first of Peter Davison's appearances in the role of James Burge, Stephen Ward's lawyer. The real James Burge (1906-90) was, as John Mortimer acknowledged, the chief inspiration for Mortimer's famous character "Rumpole of the Bailey", immortalized by Leo McKern in the long-running TV series.
This episode features Alex McQueen in the role of Mervyn Griffith-Jones, the prosecutor at the Stephen Ward trial, whose savage and pitiless treatment of Ward caused much comment at the time. Three years earlier, Griffith-Jones had been the prosecutor in the so-called "Lady Chatterley" trial, when the well-known publishing firm, Penguin Books, was accused of obscenity as a result of publishing an unexpurgated version of D.H. Lawrence's long-banned 1920s novel, "Lady Chatterley's Lover". The prosecution failed, the publication went ahead, and literary censorship in Britain was dealt a severe blow. Griffith-Jones became something of a laughing-stock at this time when he rhetorically asked the jury, "Is this a book you would like your wives or servants to read?"; he had rather more success with the Stephen Ward case, although he was much criticized when Ward committed suicide.
Stephen Ward recites several times the poem "Antigonish", an 1899 poem by the American educator and poet, William Hughes Mearns. It is also known as "The Little Man Who Wasn't There" and was adapted as a hit song under the latter title.
The character played by Anton Lesser, "Michael Eddowes", was a real-life London lawyer of considerable eminence, and a man of around 60 at the time of the Profumo Affair. In later years, he gained a lot of press attention for something very different - his private investigations into the murder of President John F. Kennedy. It was his theory that the man presented to the public as Lee Harvey Oswald was, in fact, an impostor and that the real Oswald had disappeared whilst in Russia. He spent many thousands of pounds of his own money trying to prove this idea, but was unable to do so. He lived past his 90th birthday.