The End. In so many ways, the end.

This episode saw the down­ward spi­ral of the 24 caret plonker Ick­bal from what seemed to be the unbreach­able all time low of pre­vi­ous episodes. Never miss­ing an oppor­tu­nity to show that he was as dim as he was ego­tis­ti­cal he offered numer­ous dishes to camera.

In a crown­ing artic­u­la­tion of the per­ils of upward social mobil­ity Ick­y­bal tells us that as a child he’d never dreamt of aspir­ing to the Bar imag­in­ing he’d exhaust his career in a West Mid­lands coal mine. Geeklawyer felt that even that lofty goal was a lit­tle above him, but at least being at the Bar he would not have been able to cave the roof in on his col­leagues. Pre­cious lit­tle con­so­la­tion to those of us who might trip over his ego in the rob­ing room.

On being given a wig to wear (“Wow, I’ve got a big head!” being a rare moment of self aware­ness) he impro­vised to cam­era:  “My Lords I pro­pose this case as a lot of bol­locks.” Some­how one felt the inevitable anx­i­ety that this was the exact and full qual­ity of advice and advo­cacy that his pun­ters would receive in his short lived career at the Bar before he retired to become an unli­censed cab­bie in Birm­ing­ham: “I had that Lord Neu­berger in the back of my cab the other day”.

Prob­a­bly the high­light of his career was win­ning £271.32 from the Orange phone com­pany as a lit­i­gant in per­son. Retarded Ikcbal proved well the adage that a lawyer who rep­re­sents him­self has a fool for a client: £271.32 did, how­ever, seem like suit­able high­point on which to end his career.

Bizarrely, though, there were even big­ger fools than Ikcbal on dis­play. And while Ikbal has the defence of a low IQ youth­ful exu­ber­ance and the demon­strated lim­ited capac­ity to utter any­thing other than vac­u­ous pif­fle David Wolf had no such excuse.

Mr David Wolf prac­ti­cally exuded “oil of ‘ism’” after­shave from his pores. Geeklawyer won­dered how he ever got to cham­bers in the morn­ing so deep must be his bowel loos­en­ing fear of tread­ing on an inno­cent fly or look­ing at a woman in a sex­ist non-supportive way on the Tube. Mr Wolf spent most of the episode wring­ing his hands in tear­ful angst at the ghastly elit­ism of the Bar. Matrix Cham­bers, he proudly declaimed, was engaged in organ­is­ing a revolt at the Bar by which the bas­tions of priv­i­lege would be over­thrown by hav­ing dif­fer­ent coloured areas of cham­bers to cor­re­spond with dif­fer­ent areas of practice.

“See? Green headed cham­bers notepa­per matches the green walled area of cham­bers; you know when you are in the ‘Right-On’ part of Matrix, where we fight for the under­dog at a very rea­son­able £300/hour”.

Oh, and they don’t have pupils, they have ‘Trainees’ who don’t ask clerks for help, they ask ‘Prac­tice Assis­tants’. Matrix Cham­bers can be found at Grif­fin Build­ing, Gray’s Inn. When Geeklawyer says at, he means above. Matrix Cham­bers is sus­pended about 300 foot above the ground: lev­i­tated on a cloud of its own vir­tu­ous, but inclu­sive and mutu­ally sup­port­ive, hot self right­eous air. Rumour has it that this will be pow­er­ing the next gen­er­a­tion of Zep­pelin Airships.

Our last sight of Howlin’ Wolf was his shocked tut-tuting at the pomp of a House of Lord’s deci­sion that went against his punter and how jolly elit­ist and inac­ces­si­ble it was to the man in the street. He was cut short by the cam­era before say­ing the hear­ing should really have been before the Shored­itch Work­ers Peo­ples’ Col­lec­tive Court. Mr Wolf then departed to get a break­fast of organic muesli and soy milk.

It was not all bad how­ever. The deli­cious Cat, who can sit on Geeklawyer’s lap any time, got a pup­pyledge at Keat­ing Cham­bers in Lon­don; and the funny sound­ing North­ern Lass got a pupil­lage and ten­ancy in New­cas­tle. Spiffy — she seemed fairly com­pe­tent and Geeklawyer wishes her well.

But if the pupils, aspi­rants and ten­ants seemed like a bunch of cunts then Kakoly Pande saved the day for the Bar. She exuded pure 24 carat charisma. Clever pretty mod­est and tal­ented she exhib­ited the sort of self-confidence tal­ent and class that made one doubt that she would ever fail at the Bar; fail and wind up becom­ing a Solicitor-Inadequate at the minor Mid­land solic­i­tors Fris­bees or some­such career grave­yard. Faced with objec­tions from junior ten­ants as to her prospec­tive ten­ancy she gave what seems to have been a bravura per­for­mance and won them over. Their objec­tion was less to do with her than the short­age of work at the Bar: a com­mon theme through­out the series, and rightly so.

Again, the larger and more impor­tant pol­icy dri­ven skir­mishes between the Gov­ern­ment and the Bar were not explored. This is not a crit­i­cism: a pro­gram such as this would not per­form too well by explor­ing these issues.

Over­all the fourth episode main­tained the weak­nesses of the pre­vi­ous episodes in that it didn’t step beyond the pho­to­genic. Nonethe­less it made for good tele­vi­sion: it was engag­ing and inter­est­ing if not as good a reflec­tion of the real­ity of the Bar as it could have been. One won­ders if the pub­lic are any the wiser; Geeklawyer wouldn’t know, he tries to avoid them wher­ever possible.