The Nightmare World of P.G. Wodehouse

For those of you not up to reading the adventures of Wooster and Jeeves, I can highly recommend the TV series based on the books, with Hugh Laurie as Wooster and Stephen Fry as Jeeves. Especially the latter is superb for the role!

I love those books! They're so light and silly and fun escapism.

I read once that they were written to "send up" the types of people that P.G. grew up with as a child... don't know how accurate that is.

I also love the fabulous TV series Jeeves and Wooster starring Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie. Brilliant!

It's not a textbook, Doctor, or even a Serious Novel. Just lighten up and go with it. It's a wonderful world.

Ditto on the Laurie/Fry series. There are also some good shows based on the Mulliner stories, but I don't know where to find them.

What do you mean it's not a textbook? Next I suppose you'll tell me that the War of the Ring never happened.

Some adaptations of the Mulliner stories are found in the Wodehouse Playhouse series from the BBC, mostly starring John Alderton and Pauline Collins. They've been collected on DVD and are available for purchase from Amazon and elswewhere - well worth it, in my opinion.

@ Martin R - I am told that the War of the Rings did actually happen, but I cannot vouch for it personally because I was visiting Blandings Castle at the time.

@Solandis - Wodehouse Playhouse! Could not think of it. Thank you.

If Wodehouse is your idea of a "nightmare world", you must live a very protected existence :-)

I read one Jeeves & Wooster novel and it was painfully obvious that Wodehouse didn't know how to sustain such a long piece of writing. His curse is that he was too good at short stories, and couldn't adapt.

Which is better that Beachcomber, who had difficulty sustaining anything longer than blog post length (although he could at least string several together).

PG, or "Plum" to his fans was no stranger to nightmares although it never intruded on his work. Being one assumes distracted he did not notice the invasion of France until the Wehrmacht turned up unexpectedly at his villa in 1940. He spent the war in civilian internment camps. His daughter died there.
T2

Jeeves & Wooster are hilarious. And I concur with the first comment, the series starring Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry is brilliant. I watched it recently on DVD, sitting up in bed till all hours with my laptop & headphones, trying not to laugh out loud and keep my husband awake.

If you haven't, you should check out The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier. There's a story in it where Wodehouse is married to Lovecraft. Totally excellent. But then, Alan Moore is a genius. And it comes with a pair of 3D glasses.

Sounds awesome! I'll put it on my wish list.

Some of you who may remember my occasional comments here may know I am far from a 'television snob' and am much the opposite. But I'm sorry, Wodehouse is so much 'about' the style and language that 'knowing' Wodehouse through any dramatized version is like 'knowing' a concert after watching it on 'close captioned.'

This isn't to downplay how great they may be at showing off the talents of some great comedic actors. Laurie and Fry in the Jeeves series of course, but you might check TCM or your local DVD store and find a copy of PICCADILLY JIM, a 1936 adaptation which stars Frank Morgan -- whose "Wizard of Oz" roles were just the culmination of a career as a wonderful character actor -- and the vastly underestimated Robert Montgomery and which includes Billie Burke, Robert Benchley and Eric Blore in the cast. And there were also series based on the Blandings Castle stories (with Ralph Richardson and Stanley Holloway and on the wonderful Ukridge. (My bet is that these, like the early DOCTOR WHOs and the show DETECTIVE were lost in the BBC's 'housecleaning' -- 'who the hell's ever going to need these old tapes, let's reuse them and save money')

But you have to actually read them to appreciate them. Fortunately, for those of you who can get Project Gutenberg, they have a very large selection of Wodehouse -- many of which were extreme rarieties including uncollected works. But I can't resist a sample from RIGHT HO!, JEEVES:

"I don't know if you have had the same experience, but the snag I always come up against when I'm telling a story is this dashed difficult problem of where to begin it. It's a thing you don't want to go wrong over, because one false step and you're sunk. I mean, if you fool about too long at the start, trying to establish atmosphere, as they call it, and all that sort of rot, you fail to grip and the customers walk out on you.

Get off the mark, on the other hand, like a scalded cat, and your public is at a loss. It simply raises its eyebrows, and can't make out what you're talking about.

And in opening my report of the complex case of Gussie Fink-Nottle, Madeline Bassett, my Cousin Angela, my Aunt Dahlia, my Uncle Thomas, young Tuppy Glossop and the cook, Anatole, with the above spot of dialogue, I see that I have made the second of these two floaters.

I shall have to hark back a bit. And taking it for all in all and weighing this against that, I suppose the affair may be said to have had its inception, if inception is the word I want, with that visit of mine to Cannes. If I hadn't gone to Cannes, I shouldn't have met the Bassett or bought that white mess jacket, and Angela wouldn't have met her shark, and Aunt Dahlia wouldn't have played baccarat.

You can't do that on tv, or in the movies, it takes print.

Welcome back, Jim!

Thanks, Martin. Not sure how long I'll be able to stay, between the pulls of politics -- and watching the Republicans destroy the economy for what they wrongly think is political advantage -- and probable up-coming knee surgery (which might give me much more time or none during the recuperation) but always glad to check in.

Back on topic, you call Jeeves "Holmesian" but the real echo is Poirot and Hastings -- there are numerous references to Dame Agatha throughout Wodehouse and there must be a good thesis out there tracking the cross-influences between both of them. (Christie had much more humor than is usually realized.)

One more thing: I won't be too specific for fear of getting anyone in trouble, but there are a LOT of complete British tv shows on YouTube if you look hard enough. (One teenager -- who isn't particularly a fan of britcoms -- was left a whole collection of them by "Nana" and is psting them in her honor, and there are many others who are putting up various shows -- in one case, almost every BriTec show made.)

You often get an author who creates a marvelous description of a dying world. Often it is his or her creations that everyone remembers, despite what you archeologists might discover. Jane Austen was one of the best, describing England's pre-industrial revolution upper clases. Sholom Aleikem described the eastern European Jewish communities. Marcel Proust described the upper classes of pre-WWI France. PG Wodehouse captured the English classes pre-WWII, and his representation was further strengthened by WWII propaganda, pushing Englishness to both the English and Americans as something important to be preserved.

Dig up a shtetl or an old chateau. You will find physical truth, but for cultural truth, reach for a book.

"And why Wooster goes along with the scheme against his will is even harder to understand, since he could easily get drunk and write another unflattering letter about Lady Florence. Or simply tell her "Sorry, but I refuse to marry you". Jeeves would know that."

And Nostradamus laughs at the US debt Ceiling crisis performed at the playhouse across the alley.
--ml

Every now and then I go on a Wodehouse binge. The man can write such clever dialog, and the interplay between dim Wooster and brilliant Jeeves is priceless.

The TV series is wonderful, if only to see Hugh Laurie as a young man -- before he became bitter and dour Dr. House. Fry does Jeeves impeccably.