He would go on a day trip to a stately home, for instance, “and think that it was preposterous that I didn’t live there.” He created his own identity, his own voice, with his clipped tones – “I describe myself as being mugged by a Mitford” – and I can picture Rinder as a sophisticated teenage raconteur amid bewildered school friends. “I didn’t suit the condition of childhood at all well,” he says. “I just thought the whole thing was pointless.” He used to enjoy listening to his mum’s friends complain about their difficult relationships, and although he was fairly popular, his best friend at school was the school nurse. Growing up with my incredibly emotionally literate mum has deprived me of a good five chapters of an autobiography

The evidence points to one man. Jimmy Knight has been convicted of multiple offences before and defending him will be no easy task. Not least because this is trainee barrister Adam Green's first case.

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In 2010, Rinder went to the Turks and Caicos Islands as counsel to a team investigating and prosecuting allegations of fraud and corruption. Bored at the weekends, he started writing scripts. He worked with a production company and went to meet a commissioning editor at ITV. She thought his script was terrible – but she liked Rinder and asked if he would do his own Judge Judy-type reality court show.

Rob Rinder is a barrister turned writer and broadcaster. In 2014, while still a practising barrister, he began starring in his reality court show Judge Rinder, and he now uses his legal knowledge working in the media to make the law more accessible. He is also the author of three books and a columnist for the Sun and the London Evening Standard newspapers. His participation in Who Do You Think You Are? retraced the story of his Holocaust survivor grandfather and received a BAFTA. The BBC series he presented, The Holocaust, My Family and Me, was aired to wide critical acclaim. In 2020, Rob was awarded an MBE for his services to Holocaust education and an honorary doctorate for his legal work. Rinder was 21 when he came out, “but I was meandering out at university. It wasn’t so much that I was worried about being gay, as much as doing something that would make my mum fearful for me. When I realised I was gay, HIV/Aids was a death sentence, a looming shadow. It was the time of section 28, where this was something dirty and furtive.” Also, he says: “There were so many complexities about disappointing my mum. We were the first divorced family [in her family], there was pressure on her as a single mum. At that time, being gay was cloaked in shame, and I was probably conscious about wanting to make sure my mum wouldn’t experience that.” He had also wanted to marry and have children. “That wasn’t part of the narrative for gay men then.” Accepting his sexuality “required a conscious loss”.The Trial is in the best tradition of John Mortimer's Rumpole series. A hugely enjoyable British courtroom drama' Steve Cavanagh