Trial by Judge - BBC Saturday Night Theater - Michael Hardwick

Michael Hardwick was an English author who was best known for writing books and radio plays which featured Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's creation Sherlock Holmes. He adapted most of the episodes of the Sherlock Holmes 1952–1969 BBC radio series.

Hardwick penned a dramatisation of "The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet" for the BBC Light Programme in 1959, which starred Carleton Hobbs as Sherlock Holmes and Norman Shelley as Doctor Watson. With his wife, Mollie Hardwick, he wrote a 1963 radio play The Man Who Was Sherlock Holmes. The two also authored a novelization of Billy Wilder's film, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes.

In 1979, Hardwick wrote The Prisoner of the Devil which features Holmes called in to solve the case of the Dreyfus affair. The 1980s brought Hardwick's sequel to The Hound of the Baskervilles entitled The Revenge of the Hound and published by Villard Books as well as The Private Life of Dr. Watson[10] and Sherlock Holmes: My Life and Crimes

Saturday Night Theatre was a long-running radio drama strand on BBC Radio 4. The strand showcased feature-length, middle-brow single plays on Saturday evenings for more than 50 years, having been launched in April 1943. The plays featured in the strand included stage plays, book adaptations and original dramatisations. For most of its history, programmes ran for 90 minutes and were largely entertainment-centred, such as thrillers, comedies and mysteries.

Saturday Night Theatre was noted as the major drama of the week on BBC Radio 4, until it was scrapped as a programme strand in 1996. Shorter plays continued to be broadcast on Radio 4 on Saturday evenings from 1996 until the relaunch of the channel's schedule in April 1998 by James Boyle, when single dramas were removed from the Saturday evening schedule. Since 1998, the main weekly play on the station has been The Saturday Play, a daytime programme that runs for 60–90 minutes.

There have since been campaigns to bring back Saturday Night Theatre, but in the context of BBC budget cuts, that have included the 2010 axing of Radio 4's Friday Play (established in 1998, when Saturday Night Theatre was abolished), any return looks unlikely.

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