Wogan on Wodehouse


Wogan on Wodehouse

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MUSIC: "By The Sleepy Lagoon" by Eric Coates

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"And one book. You already have the statutory ration of the Bible

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-and the works of Shakespeare."

-"I don't want the works of Shakespeare."

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"Can I take PG Wodehouse's collected works instead?"

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"No. That would... You may take your favourite three or four novels

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of PG Wodehouse. We'll bind those together for you."

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That's the great Roy Plomley, letting me know who's in charge

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on Desert Island Discs nearly three decades ago.

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But the programme invited me back just a few years later,

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and this time the BBC granted my foolish wish

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to take away the life's work of PG Wodehouse -

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to my mind, and the minds of better men than me,

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the best comic writer who ever laid his fingers on a keyboard.

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JAZZ-DANCE MUSIC

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So, this is a chance to find out what his work reveals

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about his world and ours,

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to uncover, if it's possible,

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some of the skill and complexity

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behind writing that just...trips off the page,

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to explore the elusive man behind a familiar, even controversial name,

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and to share an abiding passion

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with some like-minded coves.

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It's impossible to describe the sunniness of the language,

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the way it lifts you out of yourself like no other writer on Earth!

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I roar with laughter almost all the time.

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He's, I suppose, the funniest writer I've ever read.

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He is, really... I mean, he is truly a genius,

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in the sense that he is unique. There isn't anybody else like him.

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It's a deal-breaker. I couldn't be friends with someone who doesn't find him funny.

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It's like suddenly being given a glass of champagne.

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You just go, "Oh, well, yes. I think so!"

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Um... I just love it!

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It's a sort of comedy pornography. It's hard comedy.

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Well, maybe... Maybe I was being a little rash,

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twisting the BBC's arm for Wodehouse's complete works,

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because this groaning pile

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doesn't even come close to representing the oeuvre -

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just a healthy selection of his novels and collected short stories.

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Add memoires, countless magazine pieces,

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lyrics for the big musicals of the day,

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plays and film scripts -

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you'd need an age on that desert island to get through it.

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The sheer volume of it all is remarkable enough.

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But what really knocks you sideways about Wodehouse's 70 years and more

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as a professional writer is that virtually everything he did

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was bathed in sunshine,

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written to amuse,

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and that he succeeded with spectacular, joyous regularity.

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Just take Bertie Wooster's description

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of the formidable Honoria Glossop.

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Of course, there are probably fellows in the world -

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tough, hardy blokes with strong chins and glittering eyes -

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who could get engaged to this Glossop menace and like it,

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but I knew perfectly well that Biffy was not one of them.

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Honoria, you see, is one of those robust, dynamic girls

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with the muscles of a welterweight and a laugh

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like a squadron of cavalry charging over a tin bridge.

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So, starting somewhere near the beginning,

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here's our man Pelham Grenville, or Plum, as he called himself,

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as a mere lad - that's him on the right -

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alongside his brothers Armine and Peverill.

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Years later, Wodehouse would have Bertie Wooster observe,

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"You know, Jeeves, there's some raw work pulled at the font

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from time to time." I wonder where he got that idea!

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He was born into what we would call, I think, the upper-middle classes.

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His father was a judge in Hong Kong,

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and so his family was symbolic, one might say,

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of the type of family in the high period of the British Empire

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that both had its roots in the land,

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extending, administering, the great British Empire,

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the greatest empire the world had ever seen.

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'Sir Edward Cazelet, the author's step-grandson,

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'explained to me just what being part of a family

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'of imperial civil servants meant for the young Wodehouse.'

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Plum actually saw his parents only three times

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between the ages of two and 15.

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He saw them for six months in all over that period.

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So he really had no close relationship with them.

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Any responsible social worker nowadays would say,

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"This is quite intolerable. There'll be problems."

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When he was over 90, Wodehouse could still vividly recall a childhood

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spent shuttled between his gaggle of aunts and uncles.

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Many of the latter were clergymen, and the young Plum would join them

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on visits to the local gentry.

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There always came a time when the hostess would say,

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"Don't you think it would be nice

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if your little nephew had tea in the servants' hall?"

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And I'd go off to the servants' hall,

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and they're full of sprightly footmen and vivacious parlour maids...

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..and I loved it. I got on awfully well with them.

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Wodehouse virtually had no contact with his parents.

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Do you think that had a lasting effect on his personality?

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I think he grew up as a kind of orphan.

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Um, the first time he saw his mother,

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when he was four years old - the first time consciously -

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he thought she was another aunt. And they were absent from his life.

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He was brought up by aunts, and by butlers and chambermaids

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and footmen.

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This was his world. He lived, as it were, below stairs,

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and the picture you get of adults in his books

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is of a small boy looking at them from the wrong end of a telescope.

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Something I particularly love and admire about Wodehouse

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is his eternal optimism.

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But it's not difficult to see the impact of a lonely childhood

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running through his long life. Vast energy went into his books,

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but precious little in the way of emotion,

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and he dealt with the real world by ignoring it

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or making fun of it.

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You don't read him to experience a sort of sense of, er...

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HE LAUGHS ..of a long, developing story

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in which you get closer to the social and, er,

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emotional centres of his characters.

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One of the reasons I think people read Wodehouse's novels

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is not to find out more about people's feelings

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but to watch the way in which feeling is managed.

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That's why people read Wodehouse when they're unhappy.

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He's like a children's writer in one sense.

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It's a complete fantasy world.

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Nobody really gets hurt. Nothing really terrible happens.

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And because they're about people who are doing nothing

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and living in this extraordinary world

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which is fancy-free and has no consequences, it's comedy.

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I'm sorting through these clothes.

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Er, these are for repair and these for discarding.

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Wait a second! This white mess jacket is brand new!

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I assumed it had got into your wardrobe by mistake, sir -

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or else that it had been placed there by your enemies.

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I will have you know, Jeeves, that I bought this in Cannes!

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-And wore it, sir?

-Every night, at the casino.

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Beautiful women used to try and catch my eye.

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Presumably they thought you were a waiter, sir.

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Don't you think it was strange, though,

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that he retained

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that kind of almost naive English-public-school attitude?

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Yes. I mean, the mystery of Wodehouse

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is the childlike nature of his character.

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In his golden period, really -

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he wrote from the mid-Edwardian era all the way through to the '50s -

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there is no mention, as far as I can remember,

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and I'm pretty sure I'm right, of the First World War

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in any of his books. Not a mention!

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And that's not to say that he hasn't got a fine eye and ear

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for the Zeitgeist, so you find lots of sort of references

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to contemporary intellectual trends in his writings,

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so he refers to the Freudian subconscious

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and he talks about Red propaganda and splitting the atom

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and all these sorts of things, but he tends to do it in an ironic way,

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to joke about it.

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He knew the way the world wagged, and he was not an innocent

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in the true sense.

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It's just, as far as writing was concerned,

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he just closed his mind off to all things political,

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all things unpleasant.

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It seems to me that he was keeping the true facts, as it were,

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about the world, at arm's length throughout his writing career.

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Um, but who could blame him for that?

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'Whether it was an escape from the real world or an encounter with it,

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'Wodehouse began a hugely formative period of his life

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'here in the South London suburbs in 1894.

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'He entered Dulwich College as a boarder,

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'starting what he'd later describe

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as "six years of unbroken bliss".'

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'Here in the Masters' Library,

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'which would have been mightily familiar to Wodehouse,

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'there's a chance to learn about the education he absorbed within these walls.'

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What would have been the curriculum of the school then?

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-What would it have left him with?

-Wodehouse had no doubt

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that the ethos of the school was that a boy, a serious boy,

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should study classics, and a gentleman should study classics.

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And he said it was the best education a writer could have had.

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But they read a lot of English literature too.

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There are many embedded quotations, as you know, in Wodehouse, from English literature.

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If your little scheme works, Jeeves,

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and Rhoda gives Uncle George the heave-ho,

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-it'll do your pal a bit of good, eh?

-Yes, sir.

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I fancy he will consider it a consummation devoutly to be wished.

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Rather well put, that, Jeeves! Your own?

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No, sir! The Bard of Avon.

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When the time came for Wodehouse to leave Dulwich,

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the imposing figure of the school's master

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passed judgement on his time there.

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He said that the boy Wodehouse was often forgetful.

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"He finds difficulties in the most simple things,

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and asks absurd questions,

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whereas he can understand the more difficult things."

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"He has the most distorted ideas about wit and humour."

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And he ended up by saying, "One's obliged to like him

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in spite of his vagaries."

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In the Great Hall of Dulwich College,

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the honours board bears the name Wodehouse, EA,

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marking the success of the author's brother Armine

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in gaining a place at Oxford.

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And of Wodehouse, PG, there's not a sign.

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His father's financial problems

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meant his hopes of going to university were dashed.

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Throughout his long, long career,

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Wodehouse almost never allowed real emotional pain

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to impinge on his fiction.

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But in this case, he transposed his own disappointment

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onto Mike Jackson, all-round good egg and cricketing hero

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of some of his early novels.

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"'Aren't I going up to Cambridge, Father?' stammered Mike."

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"'I'm afraid not, Mike. I won't go into details,

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but I've lost a very large sum of money since I saw you last -

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so large that we shall have to economise in every way.'"

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"'I'm afraid, too, that you will have to start earning your living.'"

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"'I know it's a terrible disappointment to you, old chap.'"

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"'Oh. That's...all right,' said Mike, thickly."

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"There seemed to be something sticking in his throat,

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preventing him from speaking."

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He'd obviously seen Oxford

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as a way out of this somewhat restrictive childhood

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and family life, and so I think he was very cast down.

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But actually, Oxford's loss was literature's gain.

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Do you think he would have been a writer at all if he'd gone to...

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Probably not. I think he would have become a civil servant or a judge.

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-Fate worse than death!

-TERRY LAUGHS

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Instead of following his brother's path and studying Latin and Greek

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here in the city of the dreaming spires,

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Wodehouse was sent to the City of London,

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to begin his working life

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on the staff of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank.

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Well, I disliked it at first, of course,

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because all I could afford was a cup of coffee and roll of butter

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for lunch, which rather shook me to me to my foundations.

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But, er, it wasn't bad. When I got used to it, I liked it.

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Wodehouse lent his not-inconsiderable presence

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to the bank's rugby team, but he was late for work

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perhaps a little too often,

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and here at his old school

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there's evidence pointing to the young man's priorities.

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PG Wodehouse, like myself, went off and joined a bank.

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But while he was in the bank, he continued to write.

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Absolutely, and this notebook is the record

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of all that literary work that was going on

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in the evenings, weekends, or whenever he wasn't at the bank.

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He was writing stories, submitting them,

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and getting paid.

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£1, 11 and 6, I see here somewhere. It's the old money!

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-Exactly.

-Ah, memories!

-Then we get to September 1902.

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It's a marvellous month, where he notes,

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"Total for September, £16 and four shillings - record so far."

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-King's ransom.

-It's extraordinary. So then he's able to make

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this monumental decision on September 9th,

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"having to choose between the 'Globe' versus the bank,

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and chucked the latter, and started on my wild lone as a freelance."

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-So he didn't need the day job any more.

-Wonderful!

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'Wodehouse clearly had his shoulder to the journalistic wheel

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'in the years after he left school,

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'but he wasn't suited to every opportunity that came his way.'

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Wodehouse was actually an early Edwardian agony uncle.

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He was employed for a brief time by a journal

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called Tit-Bits. The owner was very proud of the fact

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that they had a problem page.

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In some ways it's a surprising find,

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but it's not surprising that Wodehouse couldn't handle

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an emotional problem page seriously. He couldn't take it seriously,

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and in fact he was "let go", as it were.

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Still, London in the early 20th century

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wasn't a bad place for a young writer to be.

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A rising, increasingly literate population

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meant that, with titles such as Punch and The Strand to the fore,

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this was the golden age of the magazine.

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Did he have to write to order, then? If you're writing for magazines

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or serials and things, it's to order, isn't it?

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Absolutely, and all his life he liked to get paid for what he did.

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He liked to deliver what you asked him to do,

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on time, to length, and get paid for it.

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-A real professional.

-A real professional journalist/writer.

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In over 70 years as a published novelist,

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beginning when he was just 20,

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this professionalism - unfussy, unrelenting -

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dominated Wodehouse's life.

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One of the things I most love about Wodehouse

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was that he was so hardworking,

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and he belongs to that generation of writers -

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two writers he very much admired, Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh -

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the same generation where they just put their books out,

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one in the spring, one in the autumn, and they worked really, really hard.

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He was a supreme professional

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for whom the day was all about getting up,

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going and sitting in front of his typewriter,

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his Royal, the same typewriter he kept throughout his life,

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and typing out the words. He said, "I sit at my desk and curse a bit,"

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-when asked what his technique was.

-It wasn't all that easy for him.

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One assumes, the way the books are written,

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that the flow would have come to him very easily,

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but he didn't sit around waiting for the muse to land.

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The Latin scholar in him would have said, "Ars celare artem est" -

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"Art is to conceal art", and he certainly concealed it.

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He was an artist, an important, very good artist.

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But he was also a professional writer,

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and he learned how to write,

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and he developed his craft deliberately,

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sitting down for long hours for years and years,

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until he could do it exquisitely.

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At his peak of productivity,

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Wodehouse wrote 8,000 words a day.

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But his work was never just produced. It was polished.

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I tell you what I love - I love revising.

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Getting the first stuff down is always hard,

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but once it's down, you can see what's wrong with it.

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'You can see that one page ought to be five pages earlier,

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'and that sort of thing.'

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Wodehouse had always wanted to pay his way as a writer.

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In 1914, aged 32, he'd taken on the additional responsibilities

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of a family man, when he married Ethel Wayman,

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and became a deeply devoted stepfather to her daughter Leonora,

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whom he would call "the queen of her species".

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His wife Ethel was quite the hostess, in their various homes

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in Long Island and in France, and he would tend to hide in his study,

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smoking his pipe and sipping his whisky,

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and probably reading back his day's work.

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The deal with Ethel, his wife, was that he made it and she spent it. That was the deal.

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Given that his wife enjoyed entertaining and gambling,

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you can see that Wodehouse needed to keep earning.

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But that doesn't begin to explain his devotion to his work.

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He didn't write to live. He wrote to exist.

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He was only interested in work,

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so if you came, and you knew his books,

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you knew him.

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His routine was, you get up, you work all morning,

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you have lunch, you go for a walk, you have a cocktail,

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you work some more, have a cup of tea, work some more, go to bed,

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listen to the radio, go to sleep, get up, work.

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It just goes on and on and on.

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He wrote because that's what he did.

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And... And his dedication, his fulfilment in writing,

0:18:290:18:34

was his life.

0:18:340:18:37

'The Clicking Of Cuthbert!

0:18:390:18:42

'A rarely seen version of one of Wodehouse's famous golf stories,

0:18:420:18:46

'and proof that the work of the master of dialogue

0:18:460:18:49

'was in demand from the silent cinema.

0:18:490:18:52

'Wodehouse was by now a major name in his own right.

0:18:520:18:55

'Enduring characters such as Psmith

0:18:550:18:58

'and the denizens of Blandings Castle

0:18:580:19:01

'were already well established, along with a duo

0:19:010:19:03

'Wodehouse described to a school friend as

0:19:030:19:06

'"a bloke called Bertie Wooster and his valet".'

0:19:060:19:09

Well, now, that came about... I was writing a short story

0:19:090:19:13

where Bertie - he was called Reggie Pepper in those days...

0:19:130:19:19

He and his friend got into an absolute fix,

0:19:200:19:25

and it's impossible that either of them could find the solution to it.

0:19:250:19:29

And it suddenly occurred to me, why shouldn't Reggie, Reggie Pepper,

0:19:290:19:34

have a valet who...was omniscient?

0:19:340:19:39

Wodehouse chronicled the adventures of the hapless Bertie Wooster

0:19:390:19:43

and his rescue by the unflappable, infallible Jeeves

0:19:430:19:46

for 60 years, and the characters remain the most familiar route

0:19:460:19:50

into the author's world of comic fantasy.

0:19:500:19:53

There is no greater lover of words, in my experience, than you.

0:19:530:19:58

When did your particular love of Wodehouse start?

0:19:580:20:02

I can date it exactly. It was my tenth birthday.

0:20:020:20:04

I was given a copy of Very Good, Jeeves

0:20:040:20:07

by a godmother, and I consumed it in an evening.

0:20:070:20:10

And it was like falling in love, all that sense of,

0:20:100:20:13

"I've been here before, I know this." Somehow it was right.

0:20:130:20:17

The way the sentences fell was just made for me, and I knew it,

0:20:170:20:20

and within a very short time I had a huge collection.

0:20:200:20:23

I think it's you that said the plotting is fantastic.

0:20:230:20:26

Obviously the characters are amazing,

0:20:260:20:28

but it's the words. It's the language.

0:20:280:20:31

That's right. It's particularly important

0:20:310:20:33

when you come to a dramatisation,

0:20:330:20:35

to look at this problem, if you like, with Wodehouse,

0:20:350:20:38

that, like any writer, there are three strands -

0:20:380:20:42

characterisation, storytelling, and the language that is used

0:20:420:20:45

to convey it all. It is the language that rises above all.

0:20:450:20:49

It is... No-one else wrote like that. I mean, he was a lord of language,

0:20:490:20:53

and there are very few of these born every generation.

0:20:530:20:56

How did you feel, yourself, to have to take on the role

0:20:560:21:00

of Jeeves, and put the words on the screen, as it were?

0:21:000:21:05

It... It was a heck of an ask.

0:21:050:21:07

I mean, two things occurred to me when Brian Eastman, the producer,

0:21:070:21:11

came to me and Hugh, and we both said afterwards,

0:21:110:21:14

on the one hand, we can't possibly do this. It would be sacrilege.

0:21:140:21:18

On the other hand, we can't possibly let anyone else do this!

0:21:180:21:22

It was going to happen, and therefore we thought, well, gosh,

0:21:220:21:26

we would kick ourselves forever if we didn't try.

0:21:260:21:29

Among the grim regiment of my aunts, only Aunt Dahlia stands alone

0:21:290:21:33

as a real sportsman. I mean, look at my aunt Agatha!

0:21:330:21:35

-Indeed, sir. Yes.

-And Aunt Julia!

0:21:350:21:38

-Quite, sir.

-And Aunt Charlotte!

0:21:380:21:41

Ugh! She's the one who sent me that rather bitter postcard

0:21:410:21:44

of Little Chilbury War Memorial when I refused to take her frightful child

0:21:440:21:48

-to lunch on the way back to school.

-Aunts are noted

0:21:480:21:50

for strong opinions, sir. It's a distinguishing mark of the breed.

0:21:500:21:54

It's a tradition. The servant-master comedy

0:21:540:21:57

is a very old tradition. It goes back to Roman plays

0:21:570:21:59

and through Ben Jonson and Commedia dell'Arte and so on.

0:21:590:22:03

People have always found delightful

0:22:030:22:05

that of the fool of an employer

0:22:050:22:09

having rings run round him by his wiser employee.

0:22:090:22:14

The thing that's so unique about Jeeves and Wooster

0:22:140:22:16

is that it's told in the first person,

0:22:160:22:18

so it's all through Bertie's voice,

0:22:180:22:21

and Bertie's voice is one of the great voices in all literature.

0:22:210:22:24

'And for me, the greatest voice of Bertie Wooster

0:22:240:22:27

'was heard in a classic BBC radio series

0:22:270:22:30

'starring Richard Briers.'

0:22:300:22:32

"'Morning, Jeeves,' I said."

0:22:320:22:35

"'Oh, good morning, sir,' said Jeeves."

0:22:350:22:38

"He put the good old cup of tea softly on the table

0:22:380:22:42

by my bed, and I took a refreshing sip."

0:22:420:22:45

"Just right, as usual."

0:22:450:22:48

"Not too hot, not too sweet, not too weak, not too strong,

0:22:480:22:52

not too much milk, and not a drop spilled in the saucer."

0:22:520:22:57

"A most amazing cove, Jeeves."

0:22:570:23:00

"So dashed competent in every respect."

0:23:000:23:03

"I've said it before, and I'll say it again."

0:23:030:23:05

"I mean to say, take just one small instance."

0:23:050:23:09

"Any other valet I've ever had used to barge into my room

0:23:090:23:13

in the morning while I was still asleep,

0:23:130:23:15

causing much misery."

0:23:150:23:18

"But Jeeves seems to know when I'm awake

0:23:180:23:20

by a sort of telepathy."

0:23:200:23:22

"He always floats in with the cup

0:23:220:23:26

exactly two minutes after I come to life."

0:23:260:23:28

"Makes a deuce of a lot of difference to a fellow's day."

0:23:280:23:33

-Wonderful words.

-Marvellous, isn't it?

0:23:330:23:36

Oh! But you took on the role of Bertie Wooster,

0:23:360:23:39

and Stephen Fry has said, rightly, that one of the great voices

0:23:390:23:43

in English literature was that of Bertie Wooster.

0:23:430:23:46

-Did you think of him as somebody - fairly vacant mind...

-Yes, yes!

0:23:460:23:50

-..but rapid tongue?

-Yes. I always felt that he wasn't that thick,

0:23:500:23:54

that he did his very best. He messed things up,

0:23:540:23:57

but he did have a very good go, and was terrified of the aunts,

0:23:570:24:00

of course. Lived in fear of the aunts.

0:24:000:24:03

But I thought he was not quite brainless as one thinks.

0:24:030:24:07

How many times was he engaged? About seven times?

0:24:070:24:10

-Terrifying.

-Only because he was afraid of the women.

0:24:100:24:13

He couldn't say no. Extraordinary. Very charming about him.

0:24:130:24:16

Now, I listened on the radio to The Purity Of The Turf,

0:24:160:24:20

which is a really funny story about Bertie and Bingo

0:24:200:24:26

trying to make a few quid on the side

0:24:260:24:29

by backing a big fat choirboy, who can run like the wind,

0:24:290:24:34

in, as it were, the school fete.

0:24:340:24:37

Now, that, in fact, although it's hard to believe...

0:24:370:24:41

-Yes.

-..is in cartoon form

0:24:410:24:45

in a Japanese comic.

0:24:450:24:47

-That's incredible!

-It starts at the back, of course.

0:24:470:24:51

And this is The Purity Of The Turf, as characterised by...

0:24:510:24:55

-Now, that can only be Bertie.

-Yes.

0:24:550:24:58

-That's right.

-And that's Jeeves.

0:24:580:25:01

-With the umbrella.

-And that's the fat choirboy...

0:25:010:25:04

-RICHARD LAUGHS

-Terribly fat, yes.

0:25:040:25:06

..who they lost a lot of money on.

0:25:060:25:09

-You can see how it's all drawn here.

-Fascinating.

0:25:090:25:13

-Isn't it amazing?

-Really amazing.

0:25:130:25:15

He was loved universally, wasn't he? Lovely stories.

0:25:150:25:19

It doesn't matter that none of us have ever had a man's gentleman,

0:25:190:25:23

a gentleman's gentleman, looking after us.

0:25:230:25:25

It doesn't matter that we haven't got horrifying aunts.

0:25:250:25:28

The fact that it isn't the real world is thrilling.

0:25:280:25:32

To paraphrase his great admirer, Evelyn Waugh,

0:25:320:25:35

Wodehouse's innocent characters are "still in Eden".

0:25:350:25:40

They've never sunk their teeth into the forbidden fruit.

0:25:400:25:43

But Wodehouse always insisted that Bertie Wooster

0:25:430:25:45

owed something to the reality of life in his Edwardian youth.

0:25:450:25:50

London was full of Berties in the old days.

0:25:500:25:55

Those fellows were all more or less dependent on aunts

0:25:550:25:58

and uncles and various people.

0:25:580:26:01

They had their little allowances,

0:26:010:26:04

and they didn't want to jeopardise them.

0:26:040:26:07

It's curious to think, nowadays, of that life,

0:26:070:26:10

but it really did exist at that time.

0:26:100:26:14

'And here in London's West End,

0:26:150:26:18

'I've joined Wodehouse scholar Norman Murphy

0:26:180:26:20

'to hear how he tracked down the real locations

0:26:200:26:23

'which feature in the world of Bertram Wilberforce Wooster.'

0:26:230:26:27

And then I read the letter, when he said,

0:26:270:26:30

"I always like using a real building, a real location."

0:26:300:26:34

"It saves time and effort."

0:26:340:26:35

-And Bertie Wooster's flat is right over there.

-Really?

0:26:350:26:39

-15 Berkeley Street.

-This is where Jeeves ministered to him?

0:26:390:26:43

Ministered to him, and Wodehouse was here for three months that year,

0:26:430:26:47

third flat, upstairs, exactly as Wodehouse tells us.

0:26:470:26:50

-That's where it all began.

-Show me more.

-Round the corner.

0:26:500:26:53

So, Norman, where are we now?

0:26:530:26:55

In some respects, we're now in the home of Wodehouse's Mayfair,

0:26:550:26:58

-because the white building there...

-Yes.

0:26:580:27:02

-Number 47...

-The one with the pillars?

0:27:020:27:04

-..is the home of Mrs Dahlia Travers.

-Oh, my word!

-Aunt Dahlia.

0:27:040:27:07

-And Aunt Dahlia he liked.

-Indeed.

-Aunt Agatha he was afraid of.

0:27:070:27:11

Exactly. Aunt Agatha was based on his own aunt Mary Deane,

0:27:110:27:15

who was the curse of his childhood, and Dahlia based on his aunt Louisa,

0:27:150:27:18

-a lady he did like.

-They were all based on his own aunts?

0:27:180:27:21

-The big ones, yes. Two of them were.

-And he was frightened of them?

0:27:210:27:25

Remember, he had 20...15 uncles... He had 15 uncles and 20 aunts.

0:27:250:27:29

20! Imagine!

0:27:290:27:31

'Next we're off in search of the gentlemen's club

0:27:310:27:34

'where Bertie Wooster and his pals whiled away so many days and nights.'

0:27:340:27:38

The immortal site is here, the Drones Club.

0:27:380:27:42

-Ah!

-The real Drones Club.

-This is it!

0:27:420:27:45

-This is it.

-The Drones.

0:27:450:27:47

In 1919, a young officer who'd come back from the trenches

0:27:470:27:50

said, "I'm now going to start a club,

0:27:500:27:52

a young man's club." He called it Buck's Club,

0:27:520:27:55

and in one story,

0:27:550:27:58

Bingo Little told Bertie all about his love for Honoria Glossop

0:27:580:28:01

in Buck's Club. Bertie wishes he would shut up,

0:28:010:28:05

because the man behind the bar, McGarry, was listening

0:28:050:28:07

with his ear flapping. Who was barman here in 1941? McGarry.

0:28:070:28:12

So these stories are based on real locales?

0:28:120:28:16

Places he knew, places his friends lived, places he knew very well.

0:28:160:28:20

This was his milieu. This was Bertie Wooster's London.

0:28:200:28:24

Bertie Wooster's Mayfair. We're here.

0:28:240:28:26

Between its publication in 1923

0:28:270:28:30

and the outbreak of war in 1939,

0:28:300:28:32

The Inimitable Jeeves alone sold around three million copies,

0:28:320:28:37

when the paperback was still in its infancy.

0:28:370:28:41

So, you might ask, just what tricks was Wodehouse pulling off

0:28:410:28:45

to reach such a vast readership? Well, the fact

0:28:450:28:48

that he was able to pepper the Jeeves-and-Wooster stories

0:28:480:28:51

with references to great literature

0:28:510:28:53

alongside talk of "squaring the elbows" or "parting brass rags"

0:28:530:28:58

provides a bit of a clue.

0:28:580:29:00

As with HG Wells, or comic predecessors

0:29:000:29:04

such as Jerome K Jerome, he found a way to appeal to the swelling ranks

0:29:040:29:08

of bank clerks and office workers in Britain and beyond.

0:29:080:29:13

And these are people who were using all kinds of local slang,

0:29:130:29:16

and he was mixing this with the classical style,

0:29:160:29:21

so it's a mixture of the high art and the low art,

0:29:210:29:23

and he was somebody who managed to make a new style

0:29:230:29:27

out of this mixture of popular and literary.

0:29:270:29:31

So, when he writes about fate being like the rock in a stocking

0:29:310:29:34

the rock in a stocking is both...

0:29:340:29:37

..wonderfully poetic - I mean, as good as Chaucer -

0:29:380:29:41

and...and...and also...

0:29:410:29:44

um, incredibly funny,

0:29:440:29:46

because it both...it's both banal

0:29:460:29:50

at the same time as being...

0:29:500:29:53

as being, er...extraordinarily profound.

0:29:530:29:56

He's a very, very good writer of sentences.

0:29:560:29:58

I mean, when I read Wodehouse as a kid,

0:29:580:30:01

you read them for the plots and what happened in them.

0:30:010:30:04

As you get older, and you take writing more seriously, as I do,

0:30:040:30:08

when I read those sentences, I think that they are...immaculate,

0:30:080:30:11

that it's very, very difficult to write a sentence as good as that.

0:30:110:30:15

And not only that, to write another one and put it next to it,

0:30:150:30:18

and then another one, and a dialogue.

0:30:180:30:20

I mean, it's fantastically high-quality writing.

0:30:200:30:25

You read it not for the plot, which you can remember,

0:30:250:30:27

but for the style, the similes, the metaphors,

0:30:270:30:30

the gloriously surreal metaphors.

0:30:300:30:33

-Uncle Fred In Springtime?

-It's called Uncle Fred In The Springtime.

0:30:330:30:37

There are many Wodehouse characters who occur again and again,

0:30:370:30:41

and Uncle Fred is one of them, Lord Ickenham.

0:30:410:30:44

He's a splendid figure, and a complete disgrace of an old man,

0:30:440:30:49

and Pongo, his nephew, is very scared of his aunt, Lady Constance,

0:30:490:30:54

and, er... HE CHUCKLES

0:30:540:30:57

..and this is what Ickenham says.

0:30:570:30:59

He says, "'Don't blame me if it turns out that that's the wrong thing

0:30:590:31:03

and Lady Constance takes her lorgnette to you.'"

0:31:030:31:06

"'God bless my soul, though - you can't compare the lorgnettes of today

0:31:060:31:10

with the ones I used to know as a boy.'"

0:31:100:31:13

"'I remember walking one day in Grosvenor Square

0:31:130:31:15

with my aunt Brenda and her pug dog Jabberwocky,

0:31:150:31:18

and a policeman came up and said that the latter ought to be wearing a muzzle.'"

0:31:180:31:22

"'My aunt made no verbal reply.'"

0:31:220:31:25

"'She merely whipped her lorgnette from its holster

0:31:250:31:28

and looked at the man, who gave one choking gasp

0:31:280:31:31

and fell back against the railings, without a mark on him,

0:31:310:31:34

but with an awful look of horror in his staring eyes,

0:31:340:31:37

as if he had seen some dreadful sight.'"

0:31:370:31:40

"'A doctor was sent for, and they managed to bring him round,

0:31:400:31:43

but he was never the same again. He had to leave the Force,

0:31:430:31:46

and eventually drifted into the grocery business.'"

0:31:460:31:49

"'And that is how Sir Thomas Lipton got his start.'"

0:31:490:31:52

No mark on him, as if he had seen some dreadful sight.

0:31:520:31:55

I mean, that's the language of Conan Doyle,

0:31:550:31:57

and it's about an aunt bringing out a lorgnette.

0:31:570:32:00

I think Wodehouse is the century's greatest comic novelist

0:32:000:32:03

surely on the strength of his language.

0:32:030:32:06

He managed to use comedy as almost a language distinct unto itself,

0:32:060:32:11

a language into which anything could be translated.

0:32:110:32:15

You want it to go slowly because the language is so funny

0:32:150:32:18

and enjoyable to read - on the other hand, the sort of helter-skelter pace

0:32:180:32:22

that's going to propel you from page one right down to the end.

0:32:220:32:26

When I say it's a bit like pornography,

0:32:260:32:28

it does.... After a while, you can become sated by it.

0:32:280:32:32

You start to read too much Wodehouse

0:32:320:32:34

and it's not just you exhaust your laughter muscles,

0:32:340:32:37

but you start to say, "Yeah, yeah, this is brilliant comedy,

0:32:370:32:41

but I'm not sure I could go on reading it all night,

0:32:410:32:46

all day tomorrow," because it's got this wonderful artificiality about it.

0:32:460:32:51

Although capturing such wonderful artificiality is no cakewalk,

0:32:530:32:57

Wodehouse Playhouse, a highly popular series of the mid-'70s,

0:32:570:33:01

remains a relatively rare example

0:33:010:33:04

of a successful Wodehouse adaptation.

0:33:040:33:07

Miss Minna Nordstrom!

0:33:070:33:10

And after Tim Rice visited the Wodehouse home

0:33:100:33:12

a few years earlier, to discuss a planned Jeeves musical,

0:33:120:33:16

he realised the task was not but the work of a moment.

0:33:160:33:20

All I felt I was doing was making the great Wodehouse less funny,

0:33:200:33:23

and I kept thinking, "This isn't..."

0:33:230:33:26

"All I'm doing is unimproving him."

0:33:260:33:30

And in the end I pulled out,

0:33:300:33:32

because there's nothing really that a musical version can add to it,

0:33:320:33:36

I don't think, can add to the genius of PG.

0:33:360:33:40

As Punch magazine had it way back when,

0:33:400:33:44

criticising Wodehouse's work

0:33:440:33:46

is "like taking a spade to a souffle".

0:33:460:33:48

But the novels and short stories that just trip off the page to read

0:33:480:33:53

are the result, of course, of almost ceaseless effort,

0:33:530:33:56

which in turn points to another curiosity about his work.

0:33:560:34:01

For him, life was about work,

0:34:010:34:03

but he wrote about people who never did any work at all.

0:34:030:34:08

And I've always found that the most intriguing paradox

0:34:080:34:13

about PG Wodehouse.

0:34:130:34:14

It can't be that Wodehouse wanted to join the ranks of the idle rich.

0:34:140:34:18

His success made him very wealthy, but idle?

0:34:180:34:23

He'd sooner have run a mile in tight shoes.

0:34:230:34:25

So was he just fixated on the upper classes? Was George Orwell,

0:34:250:34:30

who in many respects understood Wodehouse very well,

0:34:300:34:33

right to claim that his work betrays an "old-fashioned snobbishness"?

0:34:330:34:39

I think the answer is no, and I think no for two reasons,

0:34:390:34:42

the first of which is, if we actually look at the plots,

0:34:420:34:45

who's in charge, we can see very much

0:34:450:34:48

that Jeeves is in charge of not only Bertie's wardrobe

0:34:480:34:52

but his love life and his entire future.

0:34:520:34:55

So I think that what you could say about Wodehouse is

0:34:550:34:59

that the upper classes are mostly twits.

0:34:590:35:03

They are... The benefit of a good education has been lost

0:35:030:35:06

on almost all of them. The only person who knows his Shakespeare

0:35:060:35:10

and his Pope is Jeeves, so that there are subtle ways where that idea

0:35:100:35:15

that the upper class equals good

0:35:150:35:18

and the servant class equals put-upon is subverted all the way through.

0:35:180:35:23

The second reason I'd say no is class,

0:35:230:35:26

and the various ranks of class, are really, for Wodehouse,

0:35:260:35:29

they're just a plot device, a system.

0:35:290:35:31

Wodehouse's novels revolve around things being out of place.

0:35:310:35:34

His job, as a writer, is to play with these things

0:35:340:35:37

being out of place, and to put them back into their place,

0:35:370:35:41

and class provides one of the ways in which he can do that.

0:35:410:35:44

Televised here for the first time in 55 years,

0:35:440:35:47

this is the BBC version of perhaps the most famous

0:35:470:35:50

of Wodehouse's short stories, set at Blandings Castle.

0:35:500:35:53

"McAllister," I shall say, "I've had enough of your tantrums."

0:35:530:35:56

"Those flowers are mine, and I shall pick as many as I want."

0:35:560:36:00

I shall look him straight in the eye, and no nonsense! Yes, dash it!

0:36:000:36:05

Leave my flowers alone!

0:36:050:36:07

A typical Wodehouse aristocrat, Lord Emsworth,

0:36:070:36:10

is not an oppressor of the masses, but an amiable eccentric

0:36:100:36:13

who is terrified of McAllister, his grumpy Scottish gardener.

0:36:130:36:17

-Well, Your Lordship?

-Agh!

0:36:170:36:19

Er, w-w-well, McAllister, what appears to be the matter?

0:36:190:36:24

Your Lordship!

0:36:240:36:26

The topics that he writes about are very similar to those of Wilde -

0:36:260:36:29

country houses, gentlemen-about-town, aunts -

0:36:290:36:34

and he uses that sort of aphoristic wit.

0:36:340:36:37

But Wilde really was revolutionary.

0:36:370:36:40

Wilde really did turn the world, and, indeed, his own world, upside down.

0:36:400:36:45

Um...

0:36:450:36:47

But Wodehouse was, of course, conservative.

0:36:470:36:51

Despite the fact that revolution is raging around Wodehouse,

0:36:510:36:56

one never gets the feeling that he really thinks

0:36:560:36:59

that Jeeves, who is clearly much more intelligent than Bertie,

0:36:590:37:02

should actually seize economic power.

0:37:020:37:05

There's never a sense that he's interested in that kind of change.

0:37:050:37:10

No chance of Wodehouse having Jeeves storming the Winter Palace,

0:37:100:37:14

particularly when Mrs Wodehouse liked to live in some style,

0:37:140:37:18

with a staff of 11,

0:37:180:37:20

at this London address, in the '20s.

0:37:200:37:22

But does that mean that Wodehouse was a snob?

0:37:220:37:25

He married Ethel. Ethel was actually a chorus girl.

0:37:250:37:28

His best friend was a secretary.

0:37:280:37:31

He had a long correspondence with a housekeeper married to a postman.

0:37:310:37:34

For Wodehouse, it didn't matter what you did for a living. It mattered that you did it well.

0:37:340:37:39

He tended to write about the aristocracy and the landed gentry

0:37:390:37:43

and young men-about town at Drones Club

0:37:430:37:46

because he found them funny, and we still find them funny.

0:37:460:37:49

And if Wodehouse was obsessed with class,

0:37:490:37:53

how is it that he had a longstanding love affair

0:37:530:37:55

with the classless, restless energy of New York City,

0:37:550:37:59

which began when he was still making his way?

0:37:590:38:02

'I managed to sell two short stories in the first day,

0:38:020:38:06

'one for 300 and one for 200, which, of course, was wealth.'

0:38:060:38:11

So I think that was the first key that drew him to America,

0:38:110:38:17

and then soon after that came the musicals,

0:38:170:38:19

and obviously very quickly he was the man for lyrics.

0:38:190:38:24

For almost 20 years, Wodehouse the lyricist

0:38:240:38:26

was a major, enduring figure in Broadway musicals.

0:38:260:38:30

In 1917, he had five shows running at once.

0:38:300:38:35

And all the while, he was commanding top dollar

0:38:350:38:38

in the United States magazine market,

0:38:380:38:40

where authors made their name and their money.

0:38:400:38:43

He was writing, for a mammoth American audience,

0:38:430:38:46

an image of what they would like Britain, England, to be like.

0:38:460:38:51

He developed something some contemporary writers have developed,

0:38:510:38:55

which is, you sell the story in England,

0:38:550:38:57

and you sell the story all over again in America,

0:38:570:38:59

so he sells England to America, and America to England.

0:38:590:39:03

So no surprise that, when talking pictures arrived,

0:39:030:39:06

Hollywood came calling for PG Wodehouse,

0:39:060:39:08

leading light on Broadway, world-famous author.

0:39:080:39:11

As he said himself, "It was an era when only a man

0:39:110:39:15

of exceptional ability and determination

0:39:150:39:17

could keep from getting signed up by a studio in some capacity or other."

0:39:170:39:22

When he presented himself at the studio, he didn't know what he was going to do.

0:39:220:39:27

He hadn't been brought with a specific project in mind,

0:39:270:39:30

so he said, "What is it you want me to do?"

0:39:300:39:32

And very rapidly discovered that he kind of writing

0:39:320:39:39

he was expected to do was not the writing that he did.

0:39:390:39:43

This 1937 musical, starring Fred Astaire,

0:39:440:39:47

is one of the few substantial results

0:39:470:39:49

of Wodehouse's association with Hollywood,

0:39:490:39:52

a deeply frustrating experience

0:39:520:39:54

which inspired him to turn both barrels

0:39:540:39:57

on the Dream Factory.

0:39:570:39:59

Seven short stories and two novels.

0:39:590:40:02

This is real satire, with a certain amount of anger,

0:40:020:40:05

and this, in a way, was his writer's revenge

0:40:050:40:09

on the people in Hollywood who'd made a monkey out of him.

0:40:090:40:12

It is not easy to explain to the lay mind

0:40:120:40:16

the extremely intricate ramification of the personnel

0:40:160:40:18

of a Hollywood motion-picture organisation.

0:40:180:40:21

A Nodder is something like a Yes-Man,

0:40:210:40:24

only lower in the social scale. A Yes-Man's duty

0:40:240:40:27

is to attend conferences and say "Yes."

0:40:270:40:30

A Nodder's, as the name implies, is to nod.

0:40:300:40:34

The chief executive throws out some statement of opinion.

0:40:340:40:37

This is the cue for the senior Yes-Man to say yes.

0:40:370:40:40

Only when all the Yes-Men have yessed

0:40:400:40:43

do the Nodders begin to function.

0:40:430:40:45

They nod.

0:40:450:40:47

Decades of success in Britain and America

0:40:470:40:50

brought Wodehouse considerable wealth,

0:40:500:40:53

but not without complications. To simplify his tax affairs,

0:40:530:40:56

from the mid-1930s, he, Ethel, and their Pekinese

0:40:560:41:00

relocated to Northern France. In these settled surroundings,

0:41:000:41:05

he produced some of his very best work,

0:41:050:41:07

including a brilliant Jeeves-and-Wooster novel

0:41:070:41:10

containing uncharacteristic references

0:41:100:41:12

to contemporary politics.

0:41:120:41:14

No-one ever wrote a better description of the stupidity of Fascism

0:41:140:41:18

than Wodehouse in The Code Of The Woosters.

0:41:180:41:20

Wodehouse satirises Oswald Mosley and his Blackshirt movement

0:41:200:41:25

by having Bertie Wooster launch a withering verbal tirade

0:41:250:41:29

against Roderick Spode, would-be Fascist dictator

0:41:290:41:33

and leader of the Black Shorts.

0:41:330:41:35

The trouble with you, Spode, is that just because you have succeeded

0:41:350:41:39

in inducing a handful of halfwits to disfigure the London scene

0:41:390:41:43

by going about in black shorts, you think you're someone.

0:41:430:41:46

You hear them shouting "Heil Spode",

0:41:460:41:48

and you imagine it is the voice of the people.

0:41:480:41:50

That is where you make your bloomer. What the voice of the people is saying is,

0:41:500:41:54

"Look at that frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags!"

0:41:540:41:58

"Did you ever in your puff see such a perfect perisher?"

0:41:580:42:01

Encaenia, an annual ceremony steeped in tradition and academic prestige,

0:42:030:42:07

when Oxford University recognises the achievements

0:42:070:42:10

of a handful of distinguished international figures.

0:42:100:42:13

And at the 1939 ceremony, to his great surprise,

0:42:130:42:17

Pelham Grenville Wodehouse was awarded an honorary doctorate

0:42:170:42:22

by the university where he had hoped to study 40 years earlier.

0:42:220:42:26

If you see the photographs of Wodehouse getting his degree,

0:42:260:42:30

he already looks quite senior. He's all but 60.

0:42:300:42:34

So he had by then been...

0:42:340:42:38

..one of a handful of the most famous writers,

0:42:400:42:44

and writers for the theatre and the musical theatre,

0:42:440:42:47

in the world. I don't suppose he was matched. Who could match him?

0:42:470:42:51

Publishing some of his finest work, honoured by academia,

0:42:510:42:56

in the summer of 1939, Wodehouse was at the peak of his reputation.

0:42:560:43:01

A couple of months after a day of acclaim at Oxford,

0:43:010:43:04

he made a flying visit across the Channel from his French home,

0:43:040:43:07

coming here to Dulwich College to watch a cricket match.

0:43:070:43:10

'It was the last time he'd ever set foot on British soil.'

0:43:100:43:14

Wodehouse was not alone amongst expatriates in France

0:43:240:43:27

during that period to think that he didn't have anything to worry about,

0:43:270:43:31

and no-one expected France to fall in six weeks.

0:43:310:43:35

This was surprising, shall we say.

0:43:350:43:39

The road to the radio broadcasts which were to lead to accusations of treachery

0:43:390:43:43

and dog Wodehouse for the rest of his life

0:43:430:43:45

took him from arrest in Northern France deep into the Reich.

0:43:450:43:49

As an enemy alien under 60, he was sent to an internment camp,

0:43:490:43:53

but all the while, he continued to write.

0:43:530:43:55

I used to write by hand, very laboriously,

0:43:550:44:00

in a room with about 50 people playing ping pong

0:44:000:44:03

and singing and so on. I managed to get it done, though.

0:44:030:44:07

How did the Germans persuade him that it was a good idea

0:44:070:44:11

to make broadcasts to America?

0:44:110:44:14

It's a painful episode, and it's the episode in his life

0:44:140:44:17

which sadly will never go away,

0:44:170:44:19

because it's the one thing that people remember about him,

0:44:190:44:23

because it was so dramatic. Basically he was in this camp

0:44:230:44:26

in Lower Silesia - sorry, in Upper Silesia.

0:44:260:44:28

As he said, "If this is Upper Silesia, what must Lower Silesia be like?"

0:44:280:44:32

And his books, as you know, are there to cheer people up.

0:44:320:44:36

And he thought, I think with commendable stoicism and sang-froid,

0:44:360:44:42

that it was a good idea to cheer up the members of the camp,

0:44:420:44:45

and he wrote comic pieces for the entertainment of the prisoners,

0:44:450:44:50

the internees.

0:44:500:44:52

And the Lagerfuhrer, the controller of the camp,

0:44:520:44:55

spotted this.

0:44:550:44:58

I think the Germans saw a lot of publicity potential

0:44:580:45:00

in Wodehouse in 1940, '41.

0:45:000:45:03

This was a famous English writer,

0:45:030:45:05

and the real idea was to keep America out of the war.

0:45:050:45:09

In the summer of 1941, Wodehouse was released from internment

0:45:090:45:14

and sent to Berlin. Here he ran into an old acquaintance from Hollywood,

0:45:140:45:17

now working for the German foreign office,

0:45:170:45:20

who suggested he deliver some radio talks to the United States,

0:45:200:45:23

ostensibly to reassure his American fans of his wellbeing.

0:45:230:45:27

And Wodehouse thought this would be a jolly thing to do,

0:45:270:45:30

which was unbelievably foolish,

0:45:300:45:32

not because it was a stupid thing to do

0:45:320:45:35

but because he had not taken the temperature back home.

0:45:350:45:38

He hadn't been in England for some time. He didn't know what it was like in Britain during the war.

0:45:380:45:43

At this time, the full intensity of the Luftwaffe's blitz on Britain was just abating.

0:45:430:45:47

Meanwhile, the rapid advance into the Soviet Union,

0:45:470:45:50

an invasion which had begun less than a week

0:45:500:45:52

before Wodehouse's first broadcast, threatened the prospect of German victory in the East.

0:45:520:45:57

If you look at the talks, what he actually wrote and spoke,

0:45:570:46:01

they're harmless. They are absolutely classic Wodehouse comic pieces -

0:46:010:46:05

the problem being that, if you're broadcasting them from Germany

0:46:050:46:09

in 1941, they become something completely different.

0:46:090:46:12

"As a matter of fact, all through my period of internment,

0:46:120:46:15

I noticed this tendency on the part of the Germans

0:46:150:46:18

to start their little expeditions off with a whoop and a rush,

0:46:180:46:21

and then sort of lose interest. It reminded me of Hollywood."

0:46:210:46:25

You know, it's extraordinary.

0:46:250:46:27

Wodehouse compares being carted around by the Germans

0:46:270:46:32

and waiting eight hours for a train to leave

0:46:320:46:34

to working for a Hollywood studio.

0:46:340:46:37

Funny now,

0:46:370:46:39

but he plainly failed to grasp the seriousness of his

0:46:390:46:45

or his country's situation.

0:46:450:46:47

The very fact that the broadcasts are very sarcastic

0:46:470:46:50

at the expense of the Germans - that all counted for nothing.

0:46:500:46:53

He thought he had been a stiff-upper-lipped Englishman

0:46:530:46:56

in times of fear and war,

0:46:560:46:59

and he found he was considered someone who'd sold the pass.

0:46:590:47:03

-So the reaction in Britain was -

-Was hysterical.

0:47:030:47:06

The tabloids went bananas, and he was denounced as a traitor

0:47:060:47:10

and as a fellow traveller, a stooge...

0:47:100:47:12

You think about the worst things you could say about somebody, they said it.

0:47:120:47:16

Wodehouse was attacked in Parliament too,

0:47:160:47:18

but discovering the reaction of his beloved old school

0:47:180:47:22

was among his major concerns when he fell into Allied custody in 1944.

0:47:220:47:26

He was right to worry, and they did take a very dim view of it,

0:47:260:47:30

and they cut him off completely,

0:47:300:47:32

and it was said that if a boy was seen reading a Wodehouse novel,

0:47:320:47:37

he could be caned.

0:47:370:47:39

I mean, he was that vilified.

0:47:390:47:41

Would he have faced official action? Would he have been called a traitor?

0:47:410:47:45

-Would he stand trial?

-This is one of the cruel things

0:47:450:47:48

about what happened to him. When he was in Paris in 1944,

0:47:480:47:52

he was interrogated by a judge,

0:47:520:47:55

and he was given a pretty thorough going over,

0:47:550:47:58

and they concluded afterwards that there was no case to answer,

0:47:580:48:01

and that's it. But they never told him.

0:48:010:48:04

There are those who argue that a man as intelligent as PG Wodehouse

0:48:040:48:09

deserves criticism for his wartime conduct -

0:48:090:48:12

that he surely must have known what the Nazis were about,

0:48:120:48:15

and if he didn't, he should have done.

0:48:150:48:18

Well, he was certainly an intelligent, educated man,

0:48:180:48:22

but he wasn't the first or the last of those to make a mistake.

0:48:220:48:26

He was someone who always assumed the best in others,

0:48:260:48:29

who thought he was displaying a stoical disregard for hardship,

0:48:290:48:34

but completely misread his times.

0:48:340:48:36

Does that mean that the charges levelled at him hold water?

0:48:360:48:40

Not in my book.

0:48:400:48:42

Was he harshly treated by the British Establishment?

0:48:420:48:46

Absolutely.

0:48:460:48:48

Do you think that Plum was bitter about what had happened to him,

0:48:480:48:53

about the attitude of certain people in England

0:48:530:48:55

to what he had done while in Germany?

0:48:550:48:59

No. He was not a man who felt bitterness

0:48:590:49:04

in any circumstances.

0:49:040:49:06

What he was, he was deeply wounded by the attitude that had been taken

0:49:060:49:11

by quite a number in this country immediately after the war to him.

0:49:110:49:15

He couldn't face the hullaballoo, coming back.

0:49:150:49:18

I know I made an ass of myself and had to pay for it,

0:49:180:49:23

but... Oh, no, I don't feel any resentment whatever.

0:49:230:49:27

Feeling, understandably, unable to return to England,

0:49:270:49:32

Wodehouse and Ethel settled in Long Island

0:49:320:49:35

outside New York City in the 1950s.

0:49:350:49:37

Here, surrounded by books,

0:49:370:49:40

he settled into the predictable lifestyle he enjoyed,

0:49:400:49:43

including the exercise regimen, his daily dozen,

0:49:430:49:47

which he followed without fail for over 50 years.

0:49:470:49:51

And, just as his daily life followed a familiar path,

0:49:510:49:55

so too did his writing.

0:49:550:49:58

The post-war years brought rock 'n' roll,

0:49:580:50:00

the phenomenon of the teenager, the revolution in attitudes

0:50:000:50:03

towards sex. But one thing that didn't change a bit

0:50:030:50:06

was what Wodehouse called "my stuff".

0:50:060:50:09

He wanted the world to remain the same.

0:50:090:50:12

It was always the same. And not only did he want that

0:50:120:50:15

but he kept it the same by writing it the same forever.

0:50:150:50:18

He himself said, "I'm a bad case of arrested development."

0:50:180:50:21

He never... He was 21 all his life, creatively.

0:50:210:50:26

You never met Wodehouse any more than I did, to my great regret.

0:50:260:50:29

But what do you think, the fact that he wrote about the same people

0:50:290:50:34

-in the same kind of situations...

-Yes.

-What does that say about him

0:50:340:50:38

-as a person?

-I suppose you would say, pretty narrow a writer.

0:50:380:50:42

And he was obviously a comic writer. That's what he really wanted to do,

0:50:420:50:48

and he certainly didn't get in touch with Ibsen anywhere at all.

0:50:480:50:53

HE LAUGHS

0:50:530:50:54

It was just really there to amuse and make an immense fortune.

0:50:540:50:58

He was a writer who wanted to make money.

0:50:580:51:01

He said that very clearly from very early on.

0:51:010:51:04

And he was incredibly successful at doing that,

0:51:040:51:08

and I think he found a formula for making money and pursued that.

0:51:080:51:12

It's very important, and true of all really great writers,

0:51:120:51:15

that they understand their limitations.

0:51:150:51:17

He understood his, and he did what he did as well as he possibly could all his life.

0:51:170:51:21

If you have stories that you want to tell,

0:51:210:51:24

and if you feel affectionate toward your characters,

0:51:240:51:27

and you've still got stories that you have for them,

0:51:270:51:30

that you're dreaming up for them, why would you change?

0:51:300:51:33

We don't want to see Jeeves in his dotage.

0:51:330:51:35

He understood exactly the age those characters belonged at,

0:51:350:51:38

and he kept them there for decades.

0:51:380:51:41

Nonetheless, the fact that by the late 1960s

0:51:410:51:44

he'd been writing about the same characters for decade after decade

0:51:440:51:48

did present some problems.

0:51:480:51:51

Because in his head, all day every day,

0:51:510:51:54

he was thinking about his plot,

0:51:540:51:57

and, at the very end of his life,

0:51:570:51:59

he said, "This is difficult. I settle down to write a book,

0:51:590:52:03

and the hardest question is, have I written this book before?"

0:52:030:52:08

"And I have no means, other than reading them all, to be sure."

0:52:080:52:12

In 1968, a year of protest around the world,

0:52:120:52:16

Christopher MacLehose became Wodehouse's editor

0:52:160:52:20

at his London publishing house.

0:52:200:52:22

Although he was the most...

0:52:220:52:24

I mean, the iconic...comic writer in the world,

0:52:240:52:28

he was only, as I remember, selling something like

0:52:280:52:32

15,000 or 20,000 hardback books. I mean, that's not a great many.

0:52:320:52:35

And this puzzled him.

0:52:350:52:37

"Is it true," he would say, that sex and money

0:52:370:52:41

were the only things that people wanted to read about in books?

0:52:410:52:45

"I can't do that sort of thing," he said.

0:52:450:52:47

Wodehouse's work appeared in the magazines

0:52:470:52:51

which signified changing times, but for the eternal innocent,

0:52:510:52:54

sex remained out of bounds.

0:52:540:52:56

In all the Wodehouse work, beds are things you hide something under

0:52:560:53:01

or you hide under yourself. They have no other use.

0:53:010:53:04

Or you're woken up with your morning tea by your man.

0:53:040:53:06

They have no other place in human life.

0:53:060:53:09

Of course, when I started writing, sex was absolutely taboo.

0:53:090:53:13

You couldn't even hint at it.

0:53:130:53:15

I suppose one got set in one's ways.

0:53:150:53:18

Certainly he wasn't going to stop writing,

0:53:180:53:20

and he certainly wasn't going to change the way he was writing.

0:53:200:53:24

But I think he felt remote

0:53:240:53:27

from where what you would call the market was,

0:53:270:53:31

and that was one of the reasons he didn't ever come back to England.

0:53:310:53:35

He honestly felt that, if he had arrived in Southampton -

0:53:350:53:39

he would've surely come by sea -

0:53:390:53:41

that nobody would have come out to meet him.

0:53:410:53:43

I think the truth is quite otherwise.

0:53:430:53:45

I think there would've been bunting, a vast crowd of people,

0:53:450:53:49

just to set eyes on him, touch his sleeve.

0:53:490:53:52

Would you say his life was enormously happy in America?

0:53:520:53:57

He cut himself off, I think, from a lot of the realities of life.

0:53:570:54:00

It's an understatement - he was desperately sad not to come back

0:54:000:54:05

to this country.

0:54:050:54:07

Did he miss England? Did he ask you about how things were?

0:54:070:54:11

I think there were three things he wanted above all else -

0:54:110:54:14

to see rural England...

0:54:140:54:17

One was to, I think, get back to Dulwich,

0:54:170:54:21

just go to Dulwich and see it, walk round it and talk,

0:54:210:54:25

and go to a test match, a cricket test match.

0:54:250:54:29

Although past his 90th birthday,

0:54:290:54:31

Wodehouse still talked of returning to England.

0:54:310:54:35

I don't know if I'd find it very altered. I suppose I would.

0:54:350:54:39

After all, 30... How long is it? 30 years, isn't it? Long time.

0:54:390:54:44

'In the meantime he carried on writing,

0:54:440:54:47

'as he always had, amid signs that an old error of judgement

0:54:470:54:50

'had been forgiven. To his delight, a library at Dulwich College

0:54:500:54:53

'was named in his honour.'

0:54:530:54:56

He was measured for a waxwork at Madame Tussauds.

0:54:560:55:00

And then came the final act of rehabilitation.

0:55:000:55:04

PG Wodehouse gets to 90, and finally gets the knighthood.

0:55:040:55:09

I think he was thrilled by that. There'd been a big debate

0:55:090:55:12

within the British Establishment during the Wilson-Heath years.

0:55:120:55:16

Wilson was in favour of it,

0:55:160:55:19

and finally it was given in January '75,

0:55:190:55:21

the same batch, so to speak, as Charlie Chaplin.

0:55:210:55:25

And Wodehouse said a rather lovely thing.

0:55:250:55:27

When the news came through, he said, "So, that's that, then."

0:55:270:55:31

He'd been absolved, and he'd had his... He'd been given his pardon.

0:55:310:55:35

I think it's a sort of graceful act on the part of the government,

0:55:350:55:39

sort of more or less saying, "Well, that's that," you know.

0:55:390:55:43

But sadly the knighthood in some ways was the end of him,

0:55:430:55:46

because he was swamped with fan mail. He felt obliged to answer it,

0:55:460:55:49

and he developed a skin condition, went into hospital,

0:55:490:55:52

had a heart attack and he died, on St Valentine's Day '75.

0:55:520:55:56

Good writers normally deal with death, suffering, pain,

0:55:580:56:01

divorce, adultery and sexuality.

0:56:010:56:06

He avoids all those things, writes magnificent books,

0:56:060:56:10

and manages to write books that will be read

0:56:100:56:14

as long as anybody else's books.

0:56:140:56:17

Wodehouse has created characters that live for people

0:56:170:56:20

who've never picked up one of the novels,

0:56:200:56:23

and that is the sign of a really great writer.

0:56:230:56:25

You create a character that walks off the pages

0:56:250:56:27

and into the world. Amazing.

0:56:270:56:30

I find that, whatever the circumstances...

0:56:300:56:32

There was a point where my daughter was very desperately ill,

0:56:320:56:36

and the only thing I could do was read Wodehouse.

0:56:360:56:38

It got me through the most hideous time.

0:56:380:56:41

He's also left behind a feeling that...

0:56:410:56:44

you can be funny without being cruel.

0:56:440:56:48

You can be nice and charming without being boring.

0:56:480:56:53

I love that.

0:56:530:56:55

The people I most envy on Earth

0:56:550:56:57

are those who've never read any Wodehouse,

0:56:570:56:59

who pick up their first book, because they now have 90 books

0:56:590:57:03

to get through, and people have such sheer pleasure ahead of them.

0:57:030:57:08

There's no pleasure I know like it, and I envy them.

0:57:080:57:12

'After his death, the items which had been so much a part

0:57:120:57:15

'of his long working life were sent to Dulwich College,

0:57:150:57:18

'and reside in the Wodehouse Library.'

0:57:180:57:21

Here we are.

0:57:210:57:23

The great man's study,

0:57:240:57:27

brought across from Long Island in New York.

0:57:270:57:32

Wodehouse used to write down ideas in pencil.

0:57:320:57:37

"Man with horror of cats, like Lord Roberts,

0:57:370:57:40

falls in love with a girl who keeps cats."

0:57:400:57:44

Look at all this!

0:57:440:57:46

The Royal typewriter. This was his first book, I think.

0:57:460:57:50

Yeah.

0:57:500:57:52

The Pothunters.

0:57:520:57:54

-HE LAUGHS

-Very public school!

0:57:540:57:57

The Pothunters.

0:57:570:57:59

"To William Townend, these first fruits

0:57:590:58:02

of a genius at which the world will (shortly) be amazed,

0:58:020:58:07

(you see if it won't), from the author, PG Wodehouse."

0:58:070:58:11

I wonder - modest, kindly, innocent man that he was -

0:58:110:58:16

I wonder if he realised just how much of a genius he was,

0:58:160:58:20

and how much those words would come true.

0:58:200:58:25

The world would be amazed.

0:58:250:58:27

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

0:58:520:58:56

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