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MUSIC: "By The Sleepy Lagoon" by Eric Coates | 0:00:02 | 0:00:04 | |
"And one book. You already have the statutory ration of the Bible | 0:00:06 | 0:00:11 | |
-and the works of Shakespeare." -"I don't want the works of Shakespeare." | 0:00:11 | 0:00:15 | |
"Can I take PG Wodehouse's collected works instead?" | 0:00:15 | 0:00:18 | |
"No. That would... You may take your favourite three or four novels | 0:00:18 | 0:00:23 | |
of PG Wodehouse. We'll bind those together for you." | 0:00:23 | 0:00:26 | |
That's the great Roy Plomley, letting me know who's in charge | 0:00:29 | 0:00:32 | |
on Desert Island Discs nearly three decades ago. | 0:00:32 | 0:00:36 | |
But the programme invited me back just a few years later, | 0:00:36 | 0:00:40 | |
and this time the BBC granted my foolish wish | 0:00:40 | 0:00:44 | |
to take away the life's work of PG Wodehouse - | 0:00:44 | 0:00:48 | |
to my mind, and the minds of better men than me, | 0:00:48 | 0:00:51 | |
the best comic writer who ever laid his fingers on a keyboard. | 0:00:51 | 0:00:55 | |
JAZZ-DANCE MUSIC | 0:00:55 | 0:00:57 | |
So, this is a chance to find out what his work reveals | 0:00:57 | 0:01:01 | |
about his world and ours, | 0:01:01 | 0:01:04 | |
to uncover, if it's possible, | 0:01:04 | 0:01:07 | |
some of the skill and complexity | 0:01:07 | 0:01:10 | |
behind writing that just...trips off the page, | 0:01:10 | 0:01:14 | |
to explore the elusive man behind a familiar, even controversial name, | 0:01:14 | 0:01:21 | |
and to share an abiding passion | 0:01:21 | 0:01:25 | |
with some like-minded coves. | 0:01:25 | 0:01:28 | |
It's impossible to describe the sunniness of the language, | 0:01:28 | 0:01:31 | |
the way it lifts you out of yourself like no other writer on Earth! | 0:01:31 | 0:01:34 | |
I roar with laughter almost all the time. | 0:01:34 | 0:01:37 | |
He's, I suppose, the funniest writer I've ever read. | 0:01:37 | 0:01:40 | |
He is, really... I mean, he is truly a genius, | 0:01:40 | 0:01:42 | |
in the sense that he is unique. There isn't anybody else like him. | 0:01:42 | 0:01:46 | |
It's a deal-breaker. I couldn't be friends with someone who doesn't find him funny. | 0:01:46 | 0:01:51 | |
It's like suddenly being given a glass of champagne. | 0:01:51 | 0:01:53 | |
You just go, "Oh, well, yes. I think so!" | 0:01:53 | 0:01:56 | |
Um... I just love it! | 0:01:56 | 0:01:59 | |
It's a sort of comedy pornography. It's hard comedy. | 0:01:59 | 0:02:03 | |
Well, maybe... Maybe I was being a little rash, | 0:02:14 | 0:02:17 | |
twisting the BBC's arm for Wodehouse's complete works, | 0:02:17 | 0:02:20 | |
because this groaning pile | 0:02:20 | 0:02:23 | |
doesn't even come close to representing the oeuvre - | 0:02:23 | 0:02:27 | |
just a healthy selection of his novels and collected short stories. | 0:02:27 | 0:02:33 | |
Add memoires, countless magazine pieces, | 0:02:33 | 0:02:36 | |
lyrics for the big musicals of the day, | 0:02:36 | 0:02:39 | |
plays and film scripts - | 0:02:39 | 0:02:41 | |
you'd need an age on that desert island to get through it. | 0:02:41 | 0:02:45 | |
The sheer volume of it all is remarkable enough. | 0:02:45 | 0:02:48 | |
But what really knocks you sideways about Wodehouse's 70 years and more | 0:02:48 | 0:02:54 | |
as a professional writer is that virtually everything he did | 0:02:54 | 0:02:57 | |
was bathed in sunshine, | 0:02:57 | 0:02:59 | |
written to amuse, | 0:02:59 | 0:03:02 | |
and that he succeeded with spectacular, joyous regularity. | 0:03:02 | 0:03:06 | |
Just take Bertie Wooster's description | 0:03:06 | 0:03:09 | |
of the formidable Honoria Glossop. | 0:03:09 | 0:03:12 | |
Of course, there are probably fellows in the world - | 0:03:12 | 0:03:15 | |
tough, hardy blokes with strong chins and glittering eyes - | 0:03:15 | 0:03:18 | |
who could get engaged to this Glossop menace and like it, | 0:03:18 | 0:03:21 | |
but I knew perfectly well that Biffy was not one of them. | 0:03:21 | 0:03:24 | |
Honoria, you see, is one of those robust, dynamic girls | 0:03:24 | 0:03:28 | |
with the muscles of a welterweight and a laugh | 0:03:28 | 0:03:30 | |
like a squadron of cavalry charging over a tin bridge. | 0:03:30 | 0:03:35 | |
So, starting somewhere near the beginning, | 0:03:35 | 0:03:37 | |
here's our man Pelham Grenville, or Plum, as he called himself, | 0:03:37 | 0:03:42 | |
as a mere lad - that's him on the right - | 0:03:42 | 0:03:45 | |
alongside his brothers Armine and Peverill. | 0:03:45 | 0:03:49 | |
Years later, Wodehouse would have Bertie Wooster observe, | 0:03:49 | 0:03:52 | |
"You know, Jeeves, there's some raw work pulled at the font | 0:03:52 | 0:03:55 | |
from time to time." I wonder where he got that idea! | 0:03:55 | 0:04:00 | |
He was born into what we would call, I think, the upper-middle classes. | 0:04:00 | 0:04:04 | |
His father was a judge in Hong Kong, | 0:04:04 | 0:04:08 | |
and so his family was symbolic, one might say, | 0:04:08 | 0:04:12 | |
of the type of family in the high period of the British Empire | 0:04:12 | 0:04:18 | |
that both had its roots in the land, | 0:04:18 | 0:04:20 | |
extending, administering, the great British Empire, | 0:04:20 | 0:04:23 | |
the greatest empire the world had ever seen. | 0:04:23 | 0:04:26 | |
'Sir Edward Cazelet, the author's step-grandson, | 0:04:27 | 0:04:30 | |
'explained to me just what being part of a family | 0:04:30 | 0:04:33 | |
'of imperial civil servants meant for the young Wodehouse.' | 0:04:33 | 0:04:37 | |
Plum actually saw his parents only three times | 0:04:37 | 0:04:40 | |
between the ages of two and 15. | 0:04:40 | 0:04:42 | |
He saw them for six months in all over that period. | 0:04:42 | 0:04:45 | |
So he really had no close relationship with them. | 0:04:45 | 0:04:49 | |
Any responsible social worker nowadays would say, | 0:04:49 | 0:04:52 | |
"This is quite intolerable. There'll be problems." | 0:04:52 | 0:04:55 | |
When he was over 90, Wodehouse could still vividly recall a childhood | 0:04:55 | 0:05:00 | |
spent shuttled between his gaggle of aunts and uncles. | 0:05:00 | 0:05:04 | |
Many of the latter were clergymen, and the young Plum would join them | 0:05:04 | 0:05:07 | |
on visits to the local gentry. | 0:05:07 | 0:05:09 | |
There always came a time when the hostess would say, | 0:05:09 | 0:05:13 | |
"Don't you think it would be nice | 0:05:13 | 0:05:15 | |
if your little nephew had tea in the servants' hall?" | 0:05:15 | 0:05:19 | |
And I'd go off to the servants' hall, | 0:05:19 | 0:05:22 | |
and they're full of sprightly footmen and vivacious parlour maids... | 0:05:22 | 0:05:27 | |
..and I loved it. I got on awfully well with them. | 0:05:29 | 0:05:32 | |
Wodehouse virtually had no contact with his parents. | 0:05:32 | 0:05:36 | |
Do you think that had a lasting effect on his personality? | 0:05:36 | 0:05:40 | |
I think he grew up as a kind of orphan. | 0:05:40 | 0:05:42 | |
Um, the first time he saw his mother, | 0:05:42 | 0:05:45 | |
when he was four years old - the first time consciously - | 0:05:45 | 0:05:48 | |
he thought she was another aunt. And they were absent from his life. | 0:05:48 | 0:05:52 | |
He was brought up by aunts, and by butlers and chambermaids | 0:05:52 | 0:05:55 | |
and footmen. | 0:05:55 | 0:05:58 | |
This was his world. He lived, as it were, below stairs, | 0:05:58 | 0:06:01 | |
and the picture you get of adults in his books | 0:06:01 | 0:06:04 | |
is of a small boy looking at them from the wrong end of a telescope. | 0:06:04 | 0:06:08 | |
Something I particularly love and admire about Wodehouse | 0:06:08 | 0:06:12 | |
is his eternal optimism. | 0:06:12 | 0:06:15 | |
But it's not difficult to see the impact of a lonely childhood | 0:06:15 | 0:06:19 | |
running through his long life. Vast energy went into his books, | 0:06:19 | 0:06:23 | |
but precious little in the way of emotion, | 0:06:23 | 0:06:25 | |
and he dealt with the real world by ignoring it | 0:06:25 | 0:06:29 | |
or making fun of it. | 0:06:29 | 0:06:31 | |
You don't read him to experience a sort of sense of, er... | 0:06:31 | 0:06:34 | |
HE LAUGHS ..of a long, developing story | 0:06:34 | 0:06:36 | |
in which you get closer to the social and, er, | 0:06:36 | 0:06:41 | |
emotional centres of his characters. | 0:06:41 | 0:06:44 | |
One of the reasons I think people read Wodehouse's novels | 0:06:44 | 0:06:48 | |
is not to find out more about people's feelings | 0:06:48 | 0:06:52 | |
but to watch the way in which feeling is managed. | 0:06:52 | 0:06:54 | |
That's why people read Wodehouse when they're unhappy. | 0:06:54 | 0:06:58 | |
He's like a children's writer in one sense. | 0:06:58 | 0:07:00 | |
It's a complete fantasy world. | 0:07:00 | 0:07:02 | |
Nobody really gets hurt. Nothing really terrible happens. | 0:07:02 | 0:07:06 | |
And because they're about people who are doing nothing | 0:07:06 | 0:07:09 | |
and living in this extraordinary world | 0:07:09 | 0:07:11 | |
which is fancy-free and has no consequences, it's comedy. | 0:07:11 | 0:07:16 | |
I'm sorting through these clothes. | 0:07:16 | 0:07:18 | |
Er, these are for repair and these for discarding. | 0:07:18 | 0:07:22 | |
Wait a second! This white mess jacket is brand new! | 0:07:23 | 0:07:27 | |
I assumed it had got into your wardrobe by mistake, sir - | 0:07:27 | 0:07:30 | |
or else that it had been placed there by your enemies. | 0:07:30 | 0:07:33 | |
I will have you know, Jeeves, that I bought this in Cannes! | 0:07:33 | 0:07:36 | |
-And wore it, sir? -Every night, at the casino. | 0:07:36 | 0:07:40 | |
Beautiful women used to try and catch my eye. | 0:07:40 | 0:07:42 | |
Presumably they thought you were a waiter, sir. | 0:07:42 | 0:07:45 | |
Don't you think it was strange, though, | 0:07:45 | 0:07:48 | |
that he retained | 0:07:48 | 0:07:50 | |
that kind of almost naive English-public-school attitude? | 0:07:50 | 0:07:55 | |
Yes. I mean, the mystery of Wodehouse | 0:07:55 | 0:07:57 | |
is the childlike nature of his character. | 0:07:57 | 0:08:00 | |
In his golden period, really - | 0:08:00 | 0:08:03 | |
he wrote from the mid-Edwardian era all the way through to the '50s - | 0:08:03 | 0:08:07 | |
there is no mention, as far as I can remember, | 0:08:07 | 0:08:10 | |
and I'm pretty sure I'm right, of the First World War | 0:08:10 | 0:08:13 | |
in any of his books. Not a mention! | 0:08:13 | 0:08:15 | |
And that's not to say that he hasn't got a fine eye and ear | 0:08:15 | 0:08:18 | |
for the Zeitgeist, so you find lots of sort of references | 0:08:18 | 0:08:22 | |
to contemporary intellectual trends in his writings, | 0:08:22 | 0:08:26 | |
so he refers to the Freudian subconscious | 0:08:26 | 0:08:30 | |
and he talks about Red propaganda and splitting the atom | 0:08:30 | 0:08:33 | |
and all these sorts of things, but he tends to do it in an ironic way, | 0:08:33 | 0:08:37 | |
to joke about it. | 0:08:37 | 0:08:39 | |
He knew the way the world wagged, and he was not an innocent | 0:08:39 | 0:08:42 | |
in the true sense. | 0:08:42 | 0:08:45 | |
It's just, as far as writing was concerned, | 0:08:45 | 0:08:48 | |
he just closed his mind off to all things political, | 0:08:48 | 0:08:50 | |
all things unpleasant. | 0:08:50 | 0:08:52 | |
It seems to me that he was keeping the true facts, as it were, | 0:08:52 | 0:08:56 | |
about the world, at arm's length throughout his writing career. | 0:08:56 | 0:09:01 | |
Um, but who could blame him for that? | 0:09:01 | 0:09:03 | |
'Whether it was an escape from the real world or an encounter with it, | 0:09:03 | 0:09:08 | |
'Wodehouse began a hugely formative period of his life | 0:09:08 | 0:09:11 | |
'here in the South London suburbs in 1894. | 0:09:11 | 0:09:14 | |
'He entered Dulwich College as a boarder, | 0:09:14 | 0:09:17 | |
'starting what he'd later describe | 0:09:17 | 0:09:20 | |
as "six years of unbroken bliss".' | 0:09:20 | 0:09:23 | |
'Here in the Masters' Library, | 0:09:25 | 0:09:26 | |
'which would have been mightily familiar to Wodehouse, | 0:09:26 | 0:09:30 | |
'there's a chance to learn about the education he absorbed within these walls.' | 0:09:30 | 0:09:34 | |
What would have been the curriculum of the school then? | 0:09:34 | 0:09:37 | |
-What would it have left him with? -Wodehouse had no doubt | 0:09:37 | 0:09:41 | |
that the ethos of the school was that a boy, a serious boy, | 0:09:41 | 0:09:44 | |
should study classics, and a gentleman should study classics. | 0:09:44 | 0:09:48 | |
And he said it was the best education a writer could have had. | 0:09:48 | 0:09:52 | |
But they read a lot of English literature too. | 0:09:52 | 0:09:54 | |
There are many embedded quotations, as you know, in Wodehouse, from English literature. | 0:09:54 | 0:09:59 | |
If your little scheme works, Jeeves, | 0:09:59 | 0:10:01 | |
and Rhoda gives Uncle George the heave-ho, | 0:10:01 | 0:10:04 | |
-it'll do your pal a bit of good, eh? -Yes, sir. | 0:10:04 | 0:10:06 | |
I fancy he will consider it a consummation devoutly to be wished. | 0:10:06 | 0:10:10 | |
Rather well put, that, Jeeves! Your own? | 0:10:10 | 0:10:14 | |
No, sir! The Bard of Avon. | 0:10:14 | 0:10:16 | |
When the time came for Wodehouse to leave Dulwich, | 0:10:17 | 0:10:21 | |
the imposing figure of the school's master | 0:10:21 | 0:10:23 | |
passed judgement on his time there. | 0:10:23 | 0:10:26 | |
He said that the boy Wodehouse was often forgetful. | 0:10:26 | 0:10:30 | |
"He finds difficulties in the most simple things, | 0:10:30 | 0:10:33 | |
and asks absurd questions, | 0:10:33 | 0:10:36 | |
whereas he can understand the more difficult things." | 0:10:36 | 0:10:39 | |
"He has the most distorted ideas about wit and humour." | 0:10:39 | 0:10:42 | |
And he ended up by saying, "One's obliged to like him | 0:10:42 | 0:10:45 | |
in spite of his vagaries." | 0:10:45 | 0:10:47 | |
In the Great Hall of Dulwich College, | 0:10:47 | 0:10:51 | |
the honours board bears the name Wodehouse, EA, | 0:10:51 | 0:10:55 | |
marking the success of the author's brother Armine | 0:10:55 | 0:10:58 | |
in gaining a place at Oxford. | 0:10:58 | 0:11:00 | |
And of Wodehouse, PG, there's not a sign. | 0:11:00 | 0:11:04 | |
His father's financial problems | 0:11:04 | 0:11:06 | |
meant his hopes of going to university were dashed. | 0:11:06 | 0:11:10 | |
Throughout his long, long career, | 0:11:10 | 0:11:13 | |
Wodehouse almost never allowed real emotional pain | 0:11:13 | 0:11:17 | |
to impinge on his fiction. | 0:11:17 | 0:11:19 | |
But in this case, he transposed his own disappointment | 0:11:19 | 0:11:22 | |
onto Mike Jackson, all-round good egg and cricketing hero | 0:11:22 | 0:11:26 | |
of some of his early novels. | 0:11:26 | 0:11:28 | |
"'Aren't I going up to Cambridge, Father?' stammered Mike." | 0:11:28 | 0:11:32 | |
"'I'm afraid not, Mike. I won't go into details, | 0:11:32 | 0:11:36 | |
but I've lost a very large sum of money since I saw you last - | 0:11:36 | 0:11:39 | |
so large that we shall have to economise in every way.'" | 0:11:39 | 0:11:43 | |
"'I'm afraid, too, that you will have to start earning your living.'" | 0:11:43 | 0:11:47 | |
"'I know it's a terrible disappointment to you, old chap.'" | 0:11:47 | 0:11:50 | |
"'Oh. That's...all right,' said Mike, thickly." | 0:11:50 | 0:11:55 | |
"There seemed to be something sticking in his throat, | 0:11:55 | 0:11:59 | |
preventing him from speaking." | 0:11:59 | 0:12:01 | |
He'd obviously seen Oxford | 0:12:01 | 0:12:03 | |
as a way out of this somewhat restrictive childhood | 0:12:03 | 0:12:08 | |
and family life, and so I think he was very cast down. | 0:12:08 | 0:12:11 | |
But actually, Oxford's loss was literature's gain. | 0:12:11 | 0:12:14 | |
Do you think he would have been a writer at all if he'd gone to... | 0:12:14 | 0:12:18 | |
Probably not. I think he would have become a civil servant or a judge. | 0:12:18 | 0:12:22 | |
-Fate worse than death! -TERRY LAUGHS | 0:12:22 | 0:12:25 | |
Instead of following his brother's path and studying Latin and Greek | 0:12:27 | 0:12:31 | |
here in the city of the dreaming spires, | 0:12:31 | 0:12:33 | |
Wodehouse was sent to the City of London, | 0:12:33 | 0:12:36 | |
to begin his working life | 0:12:36 | 0:12:37 | |
on the staff of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank. | 0:12:37 | 0:12:40 | |
Well, I disliked it at first, of course, | 0:12:40 | 0:12:43 | |
because all I could afford was a cup of coffee and roll of butter | 0:12:43 | 0:12:48 | |
for lunch, which rather shook me to me to my foundations. | 0:12:48 | 0:12:52 | |
But, er, it wasn't bad. When I got used to it, I liked it. | 0:12:52 | 0:12:58 | |
Wodehouse lent his not-inconsiderable presence | 0:12:58 | 0:13:01 | |
to the bank's rugby team, but he was late for work | 0:13:01 | 0:13:04 | |
perhaps a little too often, | 0:13:04 | 0:13:06 | |
and here at his old school | 0:13:06 | 0:13:08 | |
there's evidence pointing to the young man's priorities. | 0:13:08 | 0:13:11 | |
PG Wodehouse, like myself, went off and joined a bank. | 0:13:11 | 0:13:15 | |
But while he was in the bank, he continued to write. | 0:13:15 | 0:13:19 | |
Absolutely, and this notebook is the record | 0:13:19 | 0:13:22 | |
of all that literary work that was going on | 0:13:22 | 0:13:25 | |
in the evenings, weekends, or whenever he wasn't at the bank. | 0:13:25 | 0:13:28 | |
He was writing stories, submitting them, | 0:13:28 | 0:13:31 | |
and getting paid. | 0:13:31 | 0:13:33 | |
£1, 11 and 6, I see here somewhere. It's the old money! | 0:13:33 | 0:13:36 | |
-Exactly. -Ah, memories! -Then we get to September 1902. | 0:13:36 | 0:13:40 | |
It's a marvellous month, where he notes, | 0:13:40 | 0:13:42 | |
"Total for September, £16 and four shillings - record so far." | 0:13:42 | 0:13:47 | |
-King's ransom. -It's extraordinary. So then he's able to make | 0:13:47 | 0:13:50 | |
this monumental decision on September 9th, | 0:13:50 | 0:13:53 | |
"having to choose between the 'Globe' versus the bank, | 0:13:53 | 0:13:56 | |
and chucked the latter, and started on my wild lone as a freelance." | 0:13:56 | 0:14:01 | |
-So he didn't need the day job any more. -Wonderful! | 0:14:01 | 0:14:04 | |
'Wodehouse clearly had his shoulder to the journalistic wheel | 0:14:04 | 0:14:08 | |
'in the years after he left school, | 0:14:08 | 0:14:10 | |
'but he wasn't suited to every opportunity that came his way.' | 0:14:10 | 0:14:13 | |
Wodehouse was actually an early Edwardian agony uncle. | 0:14:13 | 0:14:17 | |
He was employed for a brief time by a journal | 0:14:17 | 0:14:20 | |
called Tit-Bits. The owner was very proud of the fact | 0:14:20 | 0:14:23 | |
that they had a problem page. | 0:14:23 | 0:14:26 | |
In some ways it's a surprising find, | 0:14:26 | 0:14:28 | |
but it's not surprising that Wodehouse couldn't handle | 0:14:28 | 0:14:31 | |
an emotional problem page seriously. He couldn't take it seriously, | 0:14:31 | 0:14:35 | |
and in fact he was "let go", as it were. | 0:14:35 | 0:14:38 | |
Still, London in the early 20th century | 0:14:39 | 0:14:41 | |
wasn't a bad place for a young writer to be. | 0:14:41 | 0:14:44 | |
A rising, increasingly literate population | 0:14:44 | 0:14:47 | |
meant that, with titles such as Punch and The Strand to the fore, | 0:14:47 | 0:14:51 | |
this was the golden age of the magazine. | 0:14:51 | 0:14:54 | |
Did he have to write to order, then? If you're writing for magazines | 0:14:54 | 0:14:58 | |
or serials and things, it's to order, isn't it? | 0:14:58 | 0:15:01 | |
Absolutely, and all his life he liked to get paid for what he did. | 0:15:01 | 0:15:05 | |
He liked to deliver what you asked him to do, | 0:15:05 | 0:15:08 | |
on time, to length, and get paid for it. | 0:15:08 | 0:15:11 | |
-A real professional. -A real professional journalist/writer. | 0:15:11 | 0:15:15 | |
In over 70 years as a published novelist, | 0:15:17 | 0:15:20 | |
beginning when he was just 20, | 0:15:20 | 0:15:22 | |
this professionalism - unfussy, unrelenting - | 0:15:22 | 0:15:27 | |
dominated Wodehouse's life. | 0:15:27 | 0:15:29 | |
One of the things I most love about Wodehouse | 0:15:29 | 0:15:32 | |
was that he was so hardworking, | 0:15:32 | 0:15:35 | |
and he belongs to that generation of writers - | 0:15:35 | 0:15:38 | |
two writers he very much admired, Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh - | 0:15:38 | 0:15:42 | |
the same generation where they just put their books out, | 0:15:42 | 0:15:46 | |
one in the spring, one in the autumn, and they worked really, really hard. | 0:15:46 | 0:15:50 | |
He was a supreme professional | 0:15:50 | 0:15:52 | |
for whom the day was all about getting up, | 0:15:52 | 0:15:55 | |
going and sitting in front of his typewriter, | 0:15:55 | 0:15:58 | |
his Royal, the same typewriter he kept throughout his life, | 0:15:58 | 0:16:02 | |
and typing out the words. He said, "I sit at my desk and curse a bit," | 0:16:02 | 0:16:06 | |
-when asked what his technique was. -It wasn't all that easy for him. | 0:16:06 | 0:16:10 | |
One assumes, the way the books are written, | 0:16:10 | 0:16:12 | |
that the flow would have come to him very easily, | 0:16:12 | 0:16:15 | |
but he didn't sit around waiting for the muse to land. | 0:16:15 | 0:16:19 | |
The Latin scholar in him would have said, "Ars celare artem est" - | 0:16:19 | 0:16:23 | |
"Art is to conceal art", and he certainly concealed it. | 0:16:23 | 0:16:26 | |
He was an artist, an important, very good artist. | 0:16:26 | 0:16:29 | |
But he was also a professional writer, | 0:16:29 | 0:16:32 | |
and he learned how to write, | 0:16:32 | 0:16:34 | |
and he developed his craft deliberately, | 0:16:34 | 0:16:36 | |
sitting down for long hours for years and years, | 0:16:36 | 0:16:39 | |
until he could do it exquisitely. | 0:16:39 | 0:16:41 | |
At his peak of productivity, | 0:16:41 | 0:16:43 | |
Wodehouse wrote 8,000 words a day. | 0:16:43 | 0:16:47 | |
But his work was never just produced. It was polished. | 0:16:47 | 0:16:51 | |
I tell you what I love - I love revising. | 0:16:51 | 0:16:53 | |
Getting the first stuff down is always hard, | 0:16:53 | 0:16:58 | |
but once it's down, you can see what's wrong with it. | 0:16:58 | 0:17:02 | |
'You can see that one page ought to be five pages earlier, | 0:17:02 | 0:17:05 | |
'and that sort of thing.' | 0:17:05 | 0:17:07 | |
Wodehouse had always wanted to pay his way as a writer. | 0:17:07 | 0:17:10 | |
In 1914, aged 32, he'd taken on the additional responsibilities | 0:17:10 | 0:17:14 | |
of a family man, when he married Ethel Wayman, | 0:17:14 | 0:17:17 | |
and became a deeply devoted stepfather to her daughter Leonora, | 0:17:17 | 0:17:22 | |
whom he would call "the queen of her species". | 0:17:22 | 0:17:25 | |
His wife Ethel was quite the hostess, in their various homes | 0:17:25 | 0:17:29 | |
in Long Island and in France, and he would tend to hide in his study, | 0:17:29 | 0:17:34 | |
smoking his pipe and sipping his whisky, | 0:17:34 | 0:17:36 | |
and probably reading back his day's work. | 0:17:36 | 0:17:39 | |
The deal with Ethel, his wife, was that he made it and she spent it. That was the deal. | 0:17:39 | 0:17:44 | |
Given that his wife enjoyed entertaining and gambling, | 0:17:44 | 0:17:47 | |
you can see that Wodehouse needed to keep earning. | 0:17:47 | 0:17:50 | |
But that doesn't begin to explain his devotion to his work. | 0:17:50 | 0:17:54 | |
He didn't write to live. He wrote to exist. | 0:17:54 | 0:17:58 | |
He was only interested in work, | 0:17:59 | 0:18:03 | |
so if you came, and you knew his books, | 0:18:03 | 0:18:06 | |
you knew him. | 0:18:06 | 0:18:08 | |
His routine was, you get up, you work all morning, | 0:18:10 | 0:18:14 | |
you have lunch, you go for a walk, you have a cocktail, | 0:18:14 | 0:18:17 | |
you work some more, have a cup of tea, work some more, go to bed, | 0:18:17 | 0:18:20 | |
listen to the radio, go to sleep, get up, work. | 0:18:20 | 0:18:23 | |
It just goes on and on and on. | 0:18:23 | 0:18:25 | |
He wrote because that's what he did. | 0:18:25 | 0:18:28 | |
And... And his dedication, his fulfilment in writing, | 0:18:29 | 0:18:34 | |
was his life. | 0:18:34 | 0:18:37 | |
'The Clicking Of Cuthbert! | 0:18:39 | 0:18:42 | |
'A rarely seen version of one of Wodehouse's famous golf stories, | 0:18:42 | 0:18:46 | |
'and proof that the work of the master of dialogue | 0:18:46 | 0:18:49 | |
'was in demand from the silent cinema. | 0:18:49 | 0:18:52 | |
'Wodehouse was by now a major name in his own right. | 0:18:52 | 0:18:55 | |
'Enduring characters such as Psmith | 0:18:55 | 0:18:58 | |
'and the denizens of Blandings Castle | 0:18:58 | 0:19:01 | |
'were already well established, along with a duo | 0:19:01 | 0:19:03 | |
'Wodehouse described to a school friend as | 0:19:03 | 0:19:06 | |
'"a bloke called Bertie Wooster and his valet".' | 0:19:06 | 0:19:09 | |
Well, now, that came about... I was writing a short story | 0:19:09 | 0:19:13 | |
where Bertie - he was called Reggie Pepper in those days... | 0:19:13 | 0:19:19 | |
He and his friend got into an absolute fix, | 0:19:20 | 0:19:25 | |
and it's impossible that either of them could find the solution to it. | 0:19:25 | 0:19:29 | |
And it suddenly occurred to me, why shouldn't Reggie, Reggie Pepper, | 0:19:29 | 0:19:34 | |
have a valet who...was omniscient? | 0:19:34 | 0:19:39 | |
Wodehouse chronicled the adventures of the hapless Bertie Wooster | 0:19:39 | 0:19:43 | |
and his rescue by the unflappable, infallible Jeeves | 0:19:43 | 0:19:46 | |
for 60 years, and the characters remain the most familiar route | 0:19:46 | 0:19:50 | |
into the author's world of comic fantasy. | 0:19:50 | 0:19:53 | |
There is no greater lover of words, in my experience, than you. | 0:19:53 | 0:19:58 | |
When did your particular love of Wodehouse start? | 0:19:58 | 0:20:02 | |
I can date it exactly. It was my tenth birthday. | 0:20:02 | 0:20:04 | |
I was given a copy of Very Good, Jeeves | 0:20:04 | 0:20:07 | |
by a godmother, and I consumed it in an evening. | 0:20:07 | 0:20:10 | |
And it was like falling in love, all that sense of, | 0:20:10 | 0:20:13 | |
"I've been here before, I know this." Somehow it was right. | 0:20:13 | 0:20:17 | |
The way the sentences fell was just made for me, and I knew it, | 0:20:17 | 0:20:20 | |
and within a very short time I had a huge collection. | 0:20:20 | 0:20:23 | |
I think it's you that said the plotting is fantastic. | 0:20:23 | 0:20:26 | |
Obviously the characters are amazing, | 0:20:26 | 0:20:28 | |
but it's the words. It's the language. | 0:20:28 | 0:20:31 | |
That's right. It's particularly important | 0:20:31 | 0:20:33 | |
when you come to a dramatisation, | 0:20:33 | 0:20:35 | |
to look at this problem, if you like, with Wodehouse, | 0:20:35 | 0:20:38 | |
that, like any writer, there are three strands - | 0:20:38 | 0:20:42 | |
characterisation, storytelling, and the language that is used | 0:20:42 | 0:20:45 | |
to convey it all. It is the language that rises above all. | 0:20:45 | 0:20:49 | |
It is... No-one else wrote like that. I mean, he was a lord of language, | 0:20:49 | 0:20:53 | |
and there are very few of these born every generation. | 0:20:53 | 0:20:56 | |
How did you feel, yourself, to have to take on the role | 0:20:56 | 0:21:00 | |
of Jeeves, and put the words on the screen, as it were? | 0:21:00 | 0:21:05 | |
It... It was a heck of an ask. | 0:21:05 | 0:21:07 | |
I mean, two things occurred to me when Brian Eastman, the producer, | 0:21:07 | 0:21:11 | |
came to me and Hugh, and we both said afterwards, | 0:21:11 | 0:21:14 | |
on the one hand, we can't possibly do this. It would be sacrilege. | 0:21:14 | 0:21:18 | |
On the other hand, we can't possibly let anyone else do this! | 0:21:18 | 0:21:22 | |
It was going to happen, and therefore we thought, well, gosh, | 0:21:22 | 0:21:26 | |
we would kick ourselves forever if we didn't try. | 0:21:26 | 0:21:29 | |
Among the grim regiment of my aunts, only Aunt Dahlia stands alone | 0:21:29 | 0:21:33 | |
as a real sportsman. I mean, look at my aunt Agatha! | 0:21:33 | 0:21:35 | |
-Indeed, sir. Yes. -And Aunt Julia! | 0:21:35 | 0:21:38 | |
-Quite, sir. -And Aunt Charlotte! | 0:21:38 | 0:21:41 | |
Ugh! She's the one who sent me that rather bitter postcard | 0:21:41 | 0:21:44 | |
of Little Chilbury War Memorial when I refused to take her frightful child | 0:21:44 | 0:21:48 | |
-to lunch on the way back to school. -Aunts are noted | 0:21:48 | 0:21:50 | |
for strong opinions, sir. It's a distinguishing mark of the breed. | 0:21:50 | 0:21:54 | |
It's a tradition. The servant-master comedy | 0:21:54 | 0:21:57 | |
is a very old tradition. It goes back to Roman plays | 0:21:57 | 0:21:59 | |
and through Ben Jonson and Commedia dell'Arte and so on. | 0:21:59 | 0:22:03 | |
People have always found delightful | 0:22:03 | 0:22:05 | |
that of the fool of an employer | 0:22:05 | 0:22:09 | |
having rings run round him by his wiser employee. | 0:22:09 | 0:22:14 | |
The thing that's so unique about Jeeves and Wooster | 0:22:14 | 0:22:16 | |
is that it's told in the first person, | 0:22:16 | 0:22:18 | |
so it's all through Bertie's voice, | 0:22:18 | 0:22:21 | |
and Bertie's voice is one of the great voices in all literature. | 0:22:21 | 0:22:24 | |
'And for me, the greatest voice of Bertie Wooster | 0:22:24 | 0:22:27 | |
'was heard in a classic BBC radio series | 0:22:27 | 0:22:30 | |
'starring Richard Briers.' | 0:22:30 | 0:22:32 | |
"'Morning, Jeeves,' I said." | 0:22:32 | 0:22:35 | |
"'Oh, good morning, sir,' said Jeeves." | 0:22:35 | 0:22:38 | |
"He put the good old cup of tea softly on the table | 0:22:38 | 0:22:42 | |
by my bed, and I took a refreshing sip." | 0:22:42 | 0:22:45 | |
"Just right, as usual." | 0:22:45 | 0:22:48 | |
"Not too hot, not too sweet, not too weak, not too strong, | 0:22:48 | 0:22:52 | |
not too much milk, and not a drop spilled in the saucer." | 0:22:52 | 0:22:57 | |
"A most amazing cove, Jeeves." | 0:22:57 | 0:23:00 | |
"So dashed competent in every respect." | 0:23:00 | 0:23:03 | |
"I've said it before, and I'll say it again." | 0:23:03 | 0:23:05 | |
"I mean to say, take just one small instance." | 0:23:05 | 0:23:09 | |
"Any other valet I've ever had used to barge into my room | 0:23:09 | 0:23:13 | |
in the morning while I was still asleep, | 0:23:13 | 0:23:15 | |
causing much misery." | 0:23:15 | 0:23:18 | |
"But Jeeves seems to know when I'm awake | 0:23:18 | 0:23:20 | |
by a sort of telepathy." | 0:23:20 | 0:23:22 | |
"He always floats in with the cup | 0:23:22 | 0:23:26 | |
exactly two minutes after I come to life." | 0:23:26 | 0:23:28 | |
"Makes a deuce of a lot of difference to a fellow's day." | 0:23:28 | 0:23:33 | |
-Wonderful words. -Marvellous, isn't it? | 0:23:33 | 0:23:36 | |
Oh! But you took on the role of Bertie Wooster, | 0:23:36 | 0:23:39 | |
and Stephen Fry has said, rightly, that one of the great voices | 0:23:39 | 0:23:43 | |
in English literature was that of Bertie Wooster. | 0:23:43 | 0:23:46 | |
-Did you think of him as somebody - fairly vacant mind... -Yes, yes! | 0:23:46 | 0:23:50 | |
-..but rapid tongue? -Yes. I always felt that he wasn't that thick, | 0:23:50 | 0:23:54 | |
that he did his very best. He messed things up, | 0:23:54 | 0:23:57 | |
but he did have a very good go, and was terrified of the aunts, | 0:23:57 | 0:24:00 | |
of course. Lived in fear of the aunts. | 0:24:00 | 0:24:03 | |
But I thought he was not quite brainless as one thinks. | 0:24:03 | 0:24:07 | |
How many times was he engaged? About seven times? | 0:24:07 | 0:24:10 | |
-Terrifying. -Only because he was afraid of the women. | 0:24:10 | 0:24:13 | |
He couldn't say no. Extraordinary. Very charming about him. | 0:24:13 | 0:24:16 | |
Now, I listened on the radio to The Purity Of The Turf, | 0:24:16 | 0:24:20 | |
which is a really funny story about Bertie and Bingo | 0:24:20 | 0:24:26 | |
trying to make a few quid on the side | 0:24:26 | 0:24:29 | |
by backing a big fat choirboy, who can run like the wind, | 0:24:29 | 0:24:34 | |
in, as it were, the school fete. | 0:24:34 | 0:24:37 | |
Now, that, in fact, although it's hard to believe... | 0:24:37 | 0:24:41 | |
-Yes. -..is in cartoon form | 0:24:41 | 0:24:45 | |
in a Japanese comic. | 0:24:45 | 0:24:47 | |
-That's incredible! -It starts at the back, of course. | 0:24:47 | 0:24:51 | |
And this is The Purity Of The Turf, as characterised by... | 0:24:51 | 0:24:55 | |
-Now, that can only be Bertie. -Yes. | 0:24:55 | 0:24:58 | |
-That's right. -And that's Jeeves. | 0:24:58 | 0:25:01 | |
-With the umbrella. -And that's the fat choirboy... | 0:25:01 | 0:25:04 | |
-RICHARD LAUGHS -Terribly fat, yes. | 0:25:04 | 0:25:06 | |
..who they lost a lot of money on. | 0:25:06 | 0:25:09 | |
-You can see how it's all drawn here. -Fascinating. | 0:25:09 | 0:25:13 | |
-Isn't it amazing? -Really amazing. | 0:25:13 | 0:25:15 | |
He was loved universally, wasn't he? Lovely stories. | 0:25:15 | 0:25:19 | |
It doesn't matter that none of us have ever had a man's gentleman, | 0:25:19 | 0:25:23 | |
a gentleman's gentleman, looking after us. | 0:25:23 | 0:25:25 | |
It doesn't matter that we haven't got horrifying aunts. | 0:25:25 | 0:25:28 | |
The fact that it isn't the real world is thrilling. | 0:25:28 | 0:25:32 | |
To paraphrase his great admirer, Evelyn Waugh, | 0:25:32 | 0:25:35 | |
Wodehouse's innocent characters are "still in Eden". | 0:25:35 | 0:25:40 | |
They've never sunk their teeth into the forbidden fruit. | 0:25:40 | 0:25:43 | |
But Wodehouse always insisted that Bertie Wooster | 0:25:43 | 0:25:45 | |
owed something to the reality of life in his Edwardian youth. | 0:25:45 | 0:25:50 | |
London was full of Berties in the old days. | 0:25:50 | 0:25:55 | |
Those fellows were all more or less dependent on aunts | 0:25:55 | 0:25:58 | |
and uncles and various people. | 0:25:58 | 0:26:01 | |
They had their little allowances, | 0:26:01 | 0:26:04 | |
and they didn't want to jeopardise them. | 0:26:04 | 0:26:07 | |
It's curious to think, nowadays, of that life, | 0:26:07 | 0:26:10 | |
but it really did exist at that time. | 0:26:10 | 0:26:14 | |
'And here in London's West End, | 0:26:15 | 0:26:18 | |
'I've joined Wodehouse scholar Norman Murphy | 0:26:18 | 0:26:20 | |
'to hear how he tracked down the real locations | 0:26:20 | 0:26:23 | |
'which feature in the world of Bertram Wilberforce Wooster.' | 0:26:23 | 0:26:27 | |
And then I read the letter, when he said, | 0:26:27 | 0:26:30 | |
"I always like using a real building, a real location." | 0:26:30 | 0:26:34 | |
"It saves time and effort." | 0:26:34 | 0:26:35 | |
-And Bertie Wooster's flat is right over there. -Really? | 0:26:35 | 0:26:39 | |
-15 Berkeley Street. -This is where Jeeves ministered to him? | 0:26:39 | 0:26:43 | |
Ministered to him, and Wodehouse was here for three months that year, | 0:26:43 | 0:26:47 | |
third flat, upstairs, exactly as Wodehouse tells us. | 0:26:47 | 0:26:50 | |
-That's where it all began. -Show me more. -Round the corner. | 0:26:50 | 0:26:53 | |
So, Norman, where are we now? | 0:26:53 | 0:26:55 | |
In some respects, we're now in the home of Wodehouse's Mayfair, | 0:26:55 | 0:26:58 | |
-because the white building there... -Yes. | 0:26:58 | 0:27:02 | |
-Number 47... -The one with the pillars? | 0:27:02 | 0:27:04 | |
-..is the home of Mrs Dahlia Travers. -Oh, my word! -Aunt Dahlia. | 0:27:04 | 0:27:07 | |
-And Aunt Dahlia he liked. -Indeed. -Aunt Agatha he was afraid of. | 0:27:07 | 0:27:11 | |
Exactly. Aunt Agatha was based on his own aunt Mary Deane, | 0:27:11 | 0:27:15 | |
who was the curse of his childhood, and Dahlia based on his aunt Louisa, | 0:27:15 | 0:27:18 | |
-a lady he did like. -They were all based on his own aunts? | 0:27:18 | 0:27:21 | |
-The big ones, yes. Two of them were. -And he was frightened of them? | 0:27:21 | 0:27:25 | |
Remember, he had 20...15 uncles... He had 15 uncles and 20 aunts. | 0:27:25 | 0:27:29 | |
20! Imagine! | 0:27:29 | 0:27:31 | |
'Next we're off in search of the gentlemen's club | 0:27:31 | 0:27:34 | |
'where Bertie Wooster and his pals whiled away so many days and nights.' | 0:27:34 | 0:27:38 | |
The immortal site is here, the Drones Club. | 0:27:38 | 0:27:42 | |
-Ah! -The real Drones Club. -This is it! | 0:27:42 | 0:27:45 | |
-This is it. -The Drones. | 0:27:45 | 0:27:47 | |
In 1919, a young officer who'd come back from the trenches | 0:27:47 | 0:27:50 | |
said, "I'm now going to start a club, | 0:27:50 | 0:27:52 | |
a young man's club." He called it Buck's Club, | 0:27:52 | 0:27:55 | |
and in one story, | 0:27:55 | 0:27:58 | |
Bingo Little told Bertie all about his love for Honoria Glossop | 0:27:58 | 0:28:01 | |
in Buck's Club. Bertie wishes he would shut up, | 0:28:01 | 0:28:05 | |
because the man behind the bar, McGarry, was listening | 0:28:05 | 0:28:07 | |
with his ear flapping. Who was barman here in 1941? McGarry. | 0:28:07 | 0:28:12 | |
So these stories are based on real locales? | 0:28:12 | 0:28:16 | |
Places he knew, places his friends lived, places he knew very well. | 0:28:16 | 0:28:20 | |
This was his milieu. This was Bertie Wooster's London. | 0:28:20 | 0:28:24 | |
Bertie Wooster's Mayfair. We're here. | 0:28:24 | 0:28:26 | |
Between its publication in 1923 | 0:28:27 | 0:28:30 | |
and the outbreak of war in 1939, | 0:28:30 | 0:28:32 | |
The Inimitable Jeeves alone sold around three million copies, | 0:28:32 | 0:28:37 | |
when the paperback was still in its infancy. | 0:28:37 | 0:28:41 | |
So, you might ask, just what tricks was Wodehouse pulling off | 0:28:41 | 0:28:45 | |
to reach such a vast readership? Well, the fact | 0:28:45 | 0:28:48 | |
that he was able to pepper the Jeeves-and-Wooster stories | 0:28:48 | 0:28:51 | |
with references to great literature | 0:28:51 | 0:28:53 | |
alongside talk of "squaring the elbows" or "parting brass rags" | 0:28:53 | 0:28:58 | |
provides a bit of a clue. | 0:28:58 | 0:29:00 | |
As with HG Wells, or comic predecessors | 0:29:00 | 0:29:04 | |
such as Jerome K Jerome, he found a way to appeal to the swelling ranks | 0:29:04 | 0:29:08 | |
of bank clerks and office workers in Britain and beyond. | 0:29:08 | 0:29:13 | |
And these are people who were using all kinds of local slang, | 0:29:13 | 0:29:16 | |
and he was mixing this with the classical style, | 0:29:16 | 0:29:21 | |
so it's a mixture of the high art and the low art, | 0:29:21 | 0:29:23 | |
and he was somebody who managed to make a new style | 0:29:23 | 0:29:27 | |
out of this mixture of popular and literary. | 0:29:27 | 0:29:31 | |
So, when he writes about fate being like the rock in a stocking | 0:29:31 | 0:29:34 | |
the rock in a stocking is both... | 0:29:34 | 0:29:37 | |
..wonderfully poetic - I mean, as good as Chaucer - | 0:29:38 | 0:29:41 | |
and...and...and also... | 0:29:41 | 0:29:44 | |
um, incredibly funny, | 0:29:44 | 0:29:46 | |
because it both...it's both banal | 0:29:46 | 0:29:50 | |
at the same time as being... | 0:29:50 | 0:29:53 | |
as being, er...extraordinarily profound. | 0:29:53 | 0:29:56 | |
He's a very, very good writer of sentences. | 0:29:56 | 0:29:58 | |
I mean, when I read Wodehouse as a kid, | 0:29:58 | 0:30:01 | |
you read them for the plots and what happened in them. | 0:30:01 | 0:30:04 | |
As you get older, and you take writing more seriously, as I do, | 0:30:04 | 0:30:08 | |
when I read those sentences, I think that they are...immaculate, | 0:30:08 | 0:30:11 | |
that it's very, very difficult to write a sentence as good as that. | 0:30:11 | 0:30:15 | |
And not only that, to write another one and put it next to it, | 0:30:15 | 0:30:18 | |
and then another one, and a dialogue. | 0:30:18 | 0:30:20 | |
I mean, it's fantastically high-quality writing. | 0:30:20 | 0:30:25 | |
You read it not for the plot, which you can remember, | 0:30:25 | 0:30:27 | |
but for the style, the similes, the metaphors, | 0:30:27 | 0:30:30 | |
the gloriously surreal metaphors. | 0:30:30 | 0:30:33 | |
-Uncle Fred In Springtime? -It's called Uncle Fred In The Springtime. | 0:30:33 | 0:30:37 | |
There are many Wodehouse characters who occur again and again, | 0:30:37 | 0:30:41 | |
and Uncle Fred is one of them, Lord Ickenham. | 0:30:41 | 0:30:44 | |
He's a splendid figure, and a complete disgrace of an old man, | 0:30:44 | 0:30:49 | |
and Pongo, his nephew, is very scared of his aunt, Lady Constance, | 0:30:49 | 0:30:54 | |
and, er... HE CHUCKLES | 0:30:54 | 0:30:57 | |
..and this is what Ickenham says. | 0:30:57 | 0:30:59 | |
He says, "'Don't blame me if it turns out that that's the wrong thing | 0:30:59 | 0:31:03 | |
and Lady Constance takes her lorgnette to you.'" | 0:31:03 | 0:31:06 | |
"'God bless my soul, though - you can't compare the lorgnettes of today | 0:31:06 | 0:31:10 | |
with the ones I used to know as a boy.'" | 0:31:10 | 0:31:13 | |
"'I remember walking one day in Grosvenor Square | 0:31:13 | 0:31:15 | |
with my aunt Brenda and her pug dog Jabberwocky, | 0:31:15 | 0:31:18 | |
and a policeman came up and said that the latter ought to be wearing a muzzle.'" | 0:31:18 | 0:31:22 | |
"'My aunt made no verbal reply.'" | 0:31:22 | 0:31:25 | |
"'She merely whipped her lorgnette from its holster | 0:31:25 | 0:31:28 | |
and looked at the man, who gave one choking gasp | 0:31:28 | 0:31:31 | |
and fell back against the railings, without a mark on him, | 0:31:31 | 0:31:34 | |
but with an awful look of horror in his staring eyes, | 0:31:34 | 0:31:37 | |
as if he had seen some dreadful sight.'" | 0:31:37 | 0:31:40 | |
"'A doctor was sent for, and they managed to bring him round, | 0:31:40 | 0:31:43 | |
but he was never the same again. He had to leave the Force, | 0:31:43 | 0:31:46 | |
and eventually drifted into the grocery business.'" | 0:31:46 | 0:31:49 | |
"'And that is how Sir Thomas Lipton got his start.'" | 0:31:49 | 0:31:52 | |
No mark on him, as if he had seen some dreadful sight. | 0:31:52 | 0:31:55 | |
I mean, that's the language of Conan Doyle, | 0:31:55 | 0:31:57 | |
and it's about an aunt bringing out a lorgnette. | 0:31:57 | 0:32:00 | |
I think Wodehouse is the century's greatest comic novelist | 0:32:00 | 0:32:03 | |
surely on the strength of his language. | 0:32:03 | 0:32:06 | |
He managed to use comedy as almost a language distinct unto itself, | 0:32:06 | 0:32:11 | |
a language into which anything could be translated. | 0:32:11 | 0:32:15 | |
You want it to go slowly because the language is so funny | 0:32:15 | 0:32:18 | |
and enjoyable to read - on the other hand, the sort of helter-skelter pace | 0:32:18 | 0:32:22 | |
that's going to propel you from page one right down to the end. | 0:32:22 | 0:32:26 | |
When I say it's a bit like pornography, | 0:32:26 | 0:32:28 | |
it does.... After a while, you can become sated by it. | 0:32:28 | 0:32:32 | |
You start to read too much Wodehouse | 0:32:32 | 0:32:34 | |
and it's not just you exhaust your laughter muscles, | 0:32:34 | 0:32:37 | |
but you start to say, "Yeah, yeah, this is brilliant comedy, | 0:32:37 | 0:32:41 | |
but I'm not sure I could go on reading it all night, | 0:32:41 | 0:32:46 | |
all day tomorrow," because it's got this wonderful artificiality about it. | 0:32:46 | 0:32:51 | |
Although capturing such wonderful artificiality is no cakewalk, | 0:32:53 | 0:32:57 | |
Wodehouse Playhouse, a highly popular series of the mid-'70s, | 0:32:57 | 0:33:01 | |
remains a relatively rare example | 0:33:01 | 0:33:04 | |
of a successful Wodehouse adaptation. | 0:33:04 | 0:33:07 | |
Miss Minna Nordstrom! | 0:33:07 | 0:33:10 | |
And after Tim Rice visited the Wodehouse home | 0:33:10 | 0:33:12 | |
a few years earlier, to discuss a planned Jeeves musical, | 0:33:12 | 0:33:16 | |
he realised the task was not but the work of a moment. | 0:33:16 | 0:33:20 | |
All I felt I was doing was making the great Wodehouse less funny, | 0:33:20 | 0:33:23 | |
and I kept thinking, "This isn't..." | 0:33:23 | 0:33:26 | |
"All I'm doing is unimproving him." | 0:33:26 | 0:33:30 | |
And in the end I pulled out, | 0:33:30 | 0:33:32 | |
because there's nothing really that a musical version can add to it, | 0:33:32 | 0:33:36 | |
I don't think, can add to the genius of PG. | 0:33:36 | 0:33:40 | |
As Punch magazine had it way back when, | 0:33:40 | 0:33:44 | |
criticising Wodehouse's work | 0:33:44 | 0:33:46 | |
is "like taking a spade to a souffle". | 0:33:46 | 0:33:48 | |
But the novels and short stories that just trip off the page to read | 0:33:48 | 0:33:53 | |
are the result, of course, of almost ceaseless effort, | 0:33:53 | 0:33:56 | |
which in turn points to another curiosity about his work. | 0:33:56 | 0:34:01 | |
For him, life was about work, | 0:34:01 | 0:34:03 | |
but he wrote about people who never did any work at all. | 0:34:03 | 0:34:08 | |
And I've always found that the most intriguing paradox | 0:34:08 | 0:34:13 | |
about PG Wodehouse. | 0:34:13 | 0:34:14 | |
It can't be that Wodehouse wanted to join the ranks of the idle rich. | 0:34:14 | 0:34:18 | |
His success made him very wealthy, but idle? | 0:34:18 | 0:34:23 | |
He'd sooner have run a mile in tight shoes. | 0:34:23 | 0:34:25 | |
So was he just fixated on the upper classes? Was George Orwell, | 0:34:25 | 0:34:30 | |
who in many respects understood Wodehouse very well, | 0:34:30 | 0:34:33 | |
right to claim that his work betrays an "old-fashioned snobbishness"? | 0:34:33 | 0:34:39 | |
I think the answer is no, and I think no for two reasons, | 0:34:39 | 0:34:42 | |
the first of which is, if we actually look at the plots, | 0:34:42 | 0:34:45 | |
who's in charge, we can see very much | 0:34:45 | 0:34:48 | |
that Jeeves is in charge of not only Bertie's wardrobe | 0:34:48 | 0:34:52 | |
but his love life and his entire future. | 0:34:52 | 0:34:55 | |
So I think that what you could say about Wodehouse is | 0:34:55 | 0:34:59 | |
that the upper classes are mostly twits. | 0:34:59 | 0:35:03 | |
They are... The benefit of a good education has been lost | 0:35:03 | 0:35:06 | |
on almost all of them. The only person who knows his Shakespeare | 0:35:06 | 0:35:10 | |
and his Pope is Jeeves, so that there are subtle ways where that idea | 0:35:10 | 0:35:15 | |
that the upper class equals good | 0:35:15 | 0:35:18 | |
and the servant class equals put-upon is subverted all the way through. | 0:35:18 | 0:35:23 | |
The second reason I'd say no is class, | 0:35:23 | 0:35:26 | |
and the various ranks of class, are really, for Wodehouse, | 0:35:26 | 0:35:29 | |
they're just a plot device, a system. | 0:35:29 | 0:35:31 | |
Wodehouse's novels revolve around things being out of place. | 0:35:31 | 0:35:34 | |
His job, as a writer, is to play with these things | 0:35:34 | 0:35:37 | |
being out of place, and to put them back into their place, | 0:35:37 | 0:35:41 | |
and class provides one of the ways in which he can do that. | 0:35:41 | 0:35:44 | |
Televised here for the first time in 55 years, | 0:35:44 | 0:35:47 | |
this is the BBC version of perhaps the most famous | 0:35:47 | 0:35:50 | |
of Wodehouse's short stories, set at Blandings Castle. | 0:35:50 | 0:35:53 | |
"McAllister," I shall say, "I've had enough of your tantrums." | 0:35:53 | 0:35:56 | |
"Those flowers are mine, and I shall pick as many as I want." | 0:35:56 | 0:36:00 | |
I shall look him straight in the eye, and no nonsense! Yes, dash it! | 0:36:00 | 0:36:05 | |
Leave my flowers alone! | 0:36:05 | 0:36:07 | |
A typical Wodehouse aristocrat, Lord Emsworth, | 0:36:07 | 0:36:10 | |
is not an oppressor of the masses, but an amiable eccentric | 0:36:10 | 0:36:13 | |
who is terrified of McAllister, his grumpy Scottish gardener. | 0:36:13 | 0:36:17 | |
-Well, Your Lordship? -Agh! | 0:36:17 | 0:36:19 | |
Er, w-w-well, McAllister, what appears to be the matter? | 0:36:19 | 0:36:24 | |
Your Lordship! | 0:36:24 | 0:36:26 | |
The topics that he writes about are very similar to those of Wilde - | 0:36:26 | 0:36:29 | |
country houses, gentlemen-about-town, aunts - | 0:36:29 | 0:36:34 | |
and he uses that sort of aphoristic wit. | 0:36:34 | 0:36:37 | |
But Wilde really was revolutionary. | 0:36:37 | 0:36:40 | |
Wilde really did turn the world, and, indeed, his own world, upside down. | 0:36:40 | 0:36:45 | |
Um... | 0:36:45 | 0:36:47 | |
But Wodehouse was, of course, conservative. | 0:36:47 | 0:36:51 | |
Despite the fact that revolution is raging around Wodehouse, | 0:36:51 | 0:36:56 | |
one never gets the feeling that he really thinks | 0:36:56 | 0:36:59 | |
that Jeeves, who is clearly much more intelligent than Bertie, | 0:36:59 | 0:37:02 | |
should actually seize economic power. | 0:37:02 | 0:37:05 | |
There's never a sense that he's interested in that kind of change. | 0:37:05 | 0:37:10 | |
No chance of Wodehouse having Jeeves storming the Winter Palace, | 0:37:10 | 0:37:14 | |
particularly when Mrs Wodehouse liked to live in some style, | 0:37:14 | 0:37:18 | |
with a staff of 11, | 0:37:18 | 0:37:20 | |
at this London address, in the '20s. | 0:37:20 | 0:37:22 | |
But does that mean that Wodehouse was a snob? | 0:37:22 | 0:37:25 | |
He married Ethel. Ethel was actually a chorus girl. | 0:37:25 | 0:37:28 | |
His best friend was a secretary. | 0:37:28 | 0:37:31 | |
He had a long correspondence with a housekeeper married to a postman. | 0:37:31 | 0:37:34 | |
For Wodehouse, it didn't matter what you did for a living. It mattered that you did it well. | 0:37:34 | 0:37:39 | |
He tended to write about the aristocracy and the landed gentry | 0:37:39 | 0:37:43 | |
and young men-about town at Drones Club | 0:37:43 | 0:37:46 | |
because he found them funny, and we still find them funny. | 0:37:46 | 0:37:49 | |
And if Wodehouse was obsessed with class, | 0:37:49 | 0:37:53 | |
how is it that he had a longstanding love affair | 0:37:53 | 0:37:55 | |
with the classless, restless energy of New York City, | 0:37:55 | 0:37:59 | |
which began when he was still making his way? | 0:37:59 | 0:38:02 | |
'I managed to sell two short stories in the first day, | 0:38:02 | 0:38:06 | |
'one for 300 and one for 200, which, of course, was wealth.' | 0:38:06 | 0:38:11 | |
So I think that was the first key that drew him to America, | 0:38:11 | 0:38:17 | |
and then soon after that came the musicals, | 0:38:17 | 0:38:19 | |
and obviously very quickly he was the man for lyrics. | 0:38:19 | 0:38:24 | |
For almost 20 years, Wodehouse the lyricist | 0:38:24 | 0:38:26 | |
was a major, enduring figure in Broadway musicals. | 0:38:26 | 0:38:30 | |
In 1917, he had five shows running at once. | 0:38:30 | 0:38:35 | |
And all the while, he was commanding top dollar | 0:38:35 | 0:38:38 | |
in the United States magazine market, | 0:38:38 | 0:38:40 | |
where authors made their name and their money. | 0:38:40 | 0:38:43 | |
He was writing, for a mammoth American audience, | 0:38:43 | 0:38:46 | |
an image of what they would like Britain, England, to be like. | 0:38:46 | 0:38:51 | |
He developed something some contemporary writers have developed, | 0:38:51 | 0:38:55 | |
which is, you sell the story in England, | 0:38:55 | 0:38:57 | |
and you sell the story all over again in America, | 0:38:57 | 0:38:59 | |
so he sells England to America, and America to England. | 0:38:59 | 0:39:03 | |
So no surprise that, when talking pictures arrived, | 0:39:03 | 0:39:06 | |
Hollywood came calling for PG Wodehouse, | 0:39:06 | 0:39:08 | |
leading light on Broadway, world-famous author. | 0:39:08 | 0:39:11 | |
As he said himself, "It was an era when only a man | 0:39:11 | 0:39:15 | |
of exceptional ability and determination | 0:39:15 | 0:39:17 | |
could keep from getting signed up by a studio in some capacity or other." | 0:39:17 | 0:39:22 | |
When he presented himself at the studio, he didn't know what he was going to do. | 0:39:22 | 0:39:27 | |
He hadn't been brought with a specific project in mind, | 0:39:27 | 0:39:30 | |
so he said, "What is it you want me to do?" | 0:39:30 | 0:39:32 | |
And very rapidly discovered that he kind of writing | 0:39:32 | 0:39:39 | |
he was expected to do was not the writing that he did. | 0:39:39 | 0:39:43 | |
This 1937 musical, starring Fred Astaire, | 0:39:44 | 0:39:47 | |
is one of the few substantial results | 0:39:47 | 0:39:49 | |
of Wodehouse's association with Hollywood, | 0:39:49 | 0:39:52 | |
a deeply frustrating experience | 0:39:52 | 0:39:54 | |
which inspired him to turn both barrels | 0:39:54 | 0:39:57 | |
on the Dream Factory. | 0:39:57 | 0:39:59 | |
Seven short stories and two novels. | 0:39:59 | 0:40:02 | |
This is real satire, with a certain amount of anger, | 0:40:02 | 0:40:05 | |
and this, in a way, was his writer's revenge | 0:40:05 | 0:40:09 | |
on the people in Hollywood who'd made a monkey out of him. | 0:40:09 | 0:40:12 | |
It is not easy to explain to the lay mind | 0:40:12 | 0:40:16 | |
the extremely intricate ramification of the personnel | 0:40:16 | 0:40:18 | |
of a Hollywood motion-picture organisation. | 0:40:18 | 0:40:21 | |
A Nodder is something like a Yes-Man, | 0:40:21 | 0:40:24 | |
only lower in the social scale. A Yes-Man's duty | 0:40:24 | 0:40:27 | |
is to attend conferences and say "Yes." | 0:40:27 | 0:40:30 | |
A Nodder's, as the name implies, is to nod. | 0:40:30 | 0:40:34 | |
The chief executive throws out some statement of opinion. | 0:40:34 | 0:40:37 | |
This is the cue for the senior Yes-Man to say yes. | 0:40:37 | 0:40:40 | |
Only when all the Yes-Men have yessed | 0:40:40 | 0:40:43 | |
do the Nodders begin to function. | 0:40:43 | 0:40:45 | |
They nod. | 0:40:45 | 0:40:47 | |
Decades of success in Britain and America | 0:40:47 | 0:40:50 | |
brought Wodehouse considerable wealth, | 0:40:50 | 0:40:53 | |
but not without complications. To simplify his tax affairs, | 0:40:53 | 0:40:56 | |
from the mid-1930s, he, Ethel, and their Pekinese | 0:40:56 | 0:41:00 | |
relocated to Northern France. In these settled surroundings, | 0:41:00 | 0:41:05 | |
he produced some of his very best work, | 0:41:05 | 0:41:07 | |
including a brilliant Jeeves-and-Wooster novel | 0:41:07 | 0:41:10 | |
containing uncharacteristic references | 0:41:10 | 0:41:12 | |
to contemporary politics. | 0:41:12 | 0:41:14 | |
No-one ever wrote a better description of the stupidity of Fascism | 0:41:14 | 0:41:18 | |
than Wodehouse in The Code Of The Woosters. | 0:41:18 | 0:41:20 | |
Wodehouse satirises Oswald Mosley and his Blackshirt movement | 0:41:20 | 0:41:25 | |
by having Bertie Wooster launch a withering verbal tirade | 0:41:25 | 0:41:29 | |
against Roderick Spode, would-be Fascist dictator | 0:41:29 | 0:41:33 | |
and leader of the Black Shorts. | 0:41:33 | 0:41:35 | |
The trouble with you, Spode, is that just because you have succeeded | 0:41:35 | 0:41:39 | |
in inducing a handful of halfwits to disfigure the London scene | 0:41:39 | 0:41:43 | |
by going about in black shorts, you think you're someone. | 0:41:43 | 0:41:46 | |
You hear them shouting "Heil Spode", | 0:41:46 | 0:41:48 | |
and you imagine it is the voice of the people. | 0:41:48 | 0:41:50 | |
That is where you make your bloomer. What the voice of the people is saying is, | 0:41:50 | 0:41:54 | |
"Look at that frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags!" | 0:41:54 | 0:41:58 | |
"Did you ever in your puff see such a perfect perisher?" | 0:41:58 | 0:42:01 | |
Encaenia, an annual ceremony steeped in tradition and academic prestige, | 0:42:03 | 0:42:07 | |
when Oxford University recognises the achievements | 0:42:07 | 0:42:10 | |
of a handful of distinguished international figures. | 0:42:10 | 0:42:13 | |
And at the 1939 ceremony, to his great surprise, | 0:42:13 | 0:42:17 | |
Pelham Grenville Wodehouse was awarded an honorary doctorate | 0:42:17 | 0:42:22 | |
by the university where he had hoped to study 40 years earlier. | 0:42:22 | 0:42:26 | |
If you see the photographs of Wodehouse getting his degree, | 0:42:26 | 0:42:30 | |
he already looks quite senior. He's all but 60. | 0:42:30 | 0:42:34 | |
So he had by then been... | 0:42:34 | 0:42:38 | |
..one of a handful of the most famous writers, | 0:42:40 | 0:42:44 | |
and writers for the theatre and the musical theatre, | 0:42:44 | 0:42:47 | |
in the world. I don't suppose he was matched. Who could match him? | 0:42:47 | 0:42:51 | |
Publishing some of his finest work, honoured by academia, | 0:42:51 | 0:42:56 | |
in the summer of 1939, Wodehouse was at the peak of his reputation. | 0:42:56 | 0:43:01 | |
A couple of months after a day of acclaim at Oxford, | 0:43:01 | 0:43:04 | |
he made a flying visit across the Channel from his French home, | 0:43:04 | 0:43:07 | |
coming here to Dulwich College to watch a cricket match. | 0:43:07 | 0:43:10 | |
'It was the last time he'd ever set foot on British soil.' | 0:43:10 | 0:43:14 | |
Wodehouse was not alone amongst expatriates in France | 0:43:24 | 0:43:27 | |
during that period to think that he didn't have anything to worry about, | 0:43:27 | 0:43:31 | |
and no-one expected France to fall in six weeks. | 0:43:31 | 0:43:35 | |
This was surprising, shall we say. | 0:43:35 | 0:43:39 | |
The road to the radio broadcasts which were to lead to accusations of treachery | 0:43:39 | 0:43:43 | |
and dog Wodehouse for the rest of his life | 0:43:43 | 0:43:45 | |
took him from arrest in Northern France deep into the Reich. | 0:43:45 | 0:43:49 | |
As an enemy alien under 60, he was sent to an internment camp, | 0:43:49 | 0:43:53 | |
but all the while, he continued to write. | 0:43:53 | 0:43:55 | |
I used to write by hand, very laboriously, | 0:43:55 | 0:44:00 | |
in a room with about 50 people playing ping pong | 0:44:00 | 0:44:03 | |
and singing and so on. I managed to get it done, though. | 0:44:03 | 0:44:07 | |
How did the Germans persuade him that it was a good idea | 0:44:07 | 0:44:11 | |
to make broadcasts to America? | 0:44:11 | 0:44:14 | |
It's a painful episode, and it's the episode in his life | 0:44:14 | 0:44:17 | |
which sadly will never go away, | 0:44:17 | 0:44:19 | |
because it's the one thing that people remember about him, | 0:44:19 | 0:44:23 | |
because it was so dramatic. Basically he was in this camp | 0:44:23 | 0:44:26 | |
in Lower Silesia - sorry, in Upper Silesia. | 0:44:26 | 0:44:28 | |
As he said, "If this is Upper Silesia, what must Lower Silesia be like?" | 0:44:28 | 0:44:32 | |
And his books, as you know, are there to cheer people up. | 0:44:32 | 0:44:36 | |
And he thought, I think with commendable stoicism and sang-froid, | 0:44:36 | 0:44:42 | |
that it was a good idea to cheer up the members of the camp, | 0:44:42 | 0:44:45 | |
and he wrote comic pieces for the entertainment of the prisoners, | 0:44:45 | 0:44:50 | |
the internees. | 0:44:50 | 0:44:52 | |
And the Lagerfuhrer, the controller of the camp, | 0:44:52 | 0:44:55 | |
spotted this. | 0:44:55 | 0:44:58 | |
I think the Germans saw a lot of publicity potential | 0:44:58 | 0:45:00 | |
in Wodehouse in 1940, '41. | 0:45:00 | 0:45:03 | |
This was a famous English writer, | 0:45:03 | 0:45:05 | |
and the real idea was to keep America out of the war. | 0:45:05 | 0:45:09 | |
In the summer of 1941, Wodehouse was released from internment | 0:45:09 | 0:45:14 | |
and sent to Berlin. Here he ran into an old acquaintance from Hollywood, | 0:45:14 | 0:45:17 | |
now working for the German foreign office, | 0:45:17 | 0:45:20 | |
who suggested he deliver some radio talks to the United States, | 0:45:20 | 0:45:23 | |
ostensibly to reassure his American fans of his wellbeing. | 0:45:23 | 0:45:27 | |
And Wodehouse thought this would be a jolly thing to do, | 0:45:27 | 0:45:30 | |
which was unbelievably foolish, | 0:45:30 | 0:45:32 | |
not because it was a stupid thing to do | 0:45:32 | 0:45:35 | |
but because he had not taken the temperature back home. | 0:45:35 | 0:45:38 | |
He hadn't been in England for some time. He didn't know what it was like in Britain during the war. | 0:45:38 | 0:45:43 | |
At this time, the full intensity of the Luftwaffe's blitz on Britain was just abating. | 0:45:43 | 0:45:47 | |
Meanwhile, the rapid advance into the Soviet Union, | 0:45:47 | 0:45:50 | |
an invasion which had begun less than a week | 0:45:50 | 0:45:52 | |
before Wodehouse's first broadcast, threatened the prospect of German victory in the East. | 0:45:52 | 0:45:57 | |
If you look at the talks, what he actually wrote and spoke, | 0:45:57 | 0:46:01 | |
they're harmless. They are absolutely classic Wodehouse comic pieces - | 0:46:01 | 0:46:05 | |
the problem being that, if you're broadcasting them from Germany | 0:46:05 | 0:46:09 | |
in 1941, they become something completely different. | 0:46:09 | 0:46:12 | |
"As a matter of fact, all through my period of internment, | 0:46:12 | 0:46:15 | |
I noticed this tendency on the part of the Germans | 0:46:15 | 0:46:18 | |
to start their little expeditions off with a whoop and a rush, | 0:46:18 | 0:46:21 | |
and then sort of lose interest. It reminded me of Hollywood." | 0:46:21 | 0:46:25 | |
You know, it's extraordinary. | 0:46:25 | 0:46:27 | |
Wodehouse compares being carted around by the Germans | 0:46:27 | 0:46:32 | |
and waiting eight hours for a train to leave | 0:46:32 | 0:46:34 | |
to working for a Hollywood studio. | 0:46:34 | 0:46:37 | |
Funny now, | 0:46:37 | 0:46:39 | |
but he plainly failed to grasp the seriousness of his | 0:46:39 | 0:46:45 | |
or his country's situation. | 0:46:45 | 0:46:47 | |
The very fact that the broadcasts are very sarcastic | 0:46:47 | 0:46:50 | |
at the expense of the Germans - that all counted for nothing. | 0:46:50 | 0:46:53 | |
He thought he had been a stiff-upper-lipped Englishman | 0:46:53 | 0:46:56 | |
in times of fear and war, | 0:46:56 | 0:46:59 | |
and he found he was considered someone who'd sold the pass. | 0:46:59 | 0:47:03 | |
-So the reaction in Britain was - -Was hysterical. | 0:47:03 | 0:47:06 | |
The tabloids went bananas, and he was denounced as a traitor | 0:47:06 | 0:47:10 | |
and as a fellow traveller, a stooge... | 0:47:10 | 0:47:12 | |
You think about the worst things you could say about somebody, they said it. | 0:47:12 | 0:47:16 | |
Wodehouse was attacked in Parliament too, | 0:47:16 | 0:47:18 | |
but discovering the reaction of his beloved old school | 0:47:18 | 0:47:22 | |
was among his major concerns when he fell into Allied custody in 1944. | 0:47:22 | 0:47:26 | |
He was right to worry, and they did take a very dim view of it, | 0:47:26 | 0:47:30 | |
and they cut him off completely, | 0:47:30 | 0:47:32 | |
and it was said that if a boy was seen reading a Wodehouse novel, | 0:47:32 | 0:47:37 | |
he could be caned. | 0:47:37 | 0:47:39 | |
I mean, he was that vilified. | 0:47:39 | 0:47:41 | |
Would he have faced official action? Would he have been called a traitor? | 0:47:41 | 0:47:45 | |
-Would he stand trial? -This is one of the cruel things | 0:47:45 | 0:47:48 | |
about what happened to him. When he was in Paris in 1944, | 0:47:48 | 0:47:52 | |
he was interrogated by a judge, | 0:47:52 | 0:47:55 | |
and he was given a pretty thorough going over, | 0:47:55 | 0:47:58 | |
and they concluded afterwards that there was no case to answer, | 0:47:58 | 0:48:01 | |
and that's it. But they never told him. | 0:48:01 | 0:48:04 | |
There are those who argue that a man as intelligent as PG Wodehouse | 0:48:04 | 0:48:09 | |
deserves criticism for his wartime conduct - | 0:48:09 | 0:48:12 | |
that he surely must have known what the Nazis were about, | 0:48:12 | 0:48:15 | |
and if he didn't, he should have done. | 0:48:15 | 0:48:18 | |
Well, he was certainly an intelligent, educated man, | 0:48:18 | 0:48:22 | |
but he wasn't the first or the last of those to make a mistake. | 0:48:22 | 0:48:26 | |
He was someone who always assumed the best in others, | 0:48:26 | 0:48:29 | |
who thought he was displaying a stoical disregard for hardship, | 0:48:29 | 0:48:34 | |
but completely misread his times. | 0:48:34 | 0:48:36 | |
Does that mean that the charges levelled at him hold water? | 0:48:36 | 0:48:40 | |
Not in my book. | 0:48:40 | 0:48:42 | |
Was he harshly treated by the British Establishment? | 0:48:42 | 0:48:46 | |
Absolutely. | 0:48:46 | 0:48:48 | |
Do you think that Plum was bitter about what had happened to him, | 0:48:48 | 0:48:53 | |
about the attitude of certain people in England | 0:48:53 | 0:48:55 | |
to what he had done while in Germany? | 0:48:55 | 0:48:59 | |
No. He was not a man who felt bitterness | 0:48:59 | 0:49:04 | |
in any circumstances. | 0:49:04 | 0:49:06 | |
What he was, he was deeply wounded by the attitude that had been taken | 0:49:06 | 0:49:11 | |
by quite a number in this country immediately after the war to him. | 0:49:11 | 0:49:15 | |
He couldn't face the hullaballoo, coming back. | 0:49:15 | 0:49:18 | |
I know I made an ass of myself and had to pay for it, | 0:49:18 | 0:49:23 | |
but... Oh, no, I don't feel any resentment whatever. | 0:49:23 | 0:49:27 | |
Feeling, understandably, unable to return to England, | 0:49:27 | 0:49:32 | |
Wodehouse and Ethel settled in Long Island | 0:49:32 | 0:49:35 | |
outside New York City in the 1950s. | 0:49:35 | 0:49:37 | |
Here, surrounded by books, | 0:49:37 | 0:49:40 | |
he settled into the predictable lifestyle he enjoyed, | 0:49:40 | 0:49:43 | |
including the exercise regimen, his daily dozen, | 0:49:43 | 0:49:47 | |
which he followed without fail for over 50 years. | 0:49:47 | 0:49:51 | |
And, just as his daily life followed a familiar path, | 0:49:51 | 0:49:55 | |
so too did his writing. | 0:49:55 | 0:49:58 | |
The post-war years brought rock 'n' roll, | 0:49:58 | 0:50:00 | |
the phenomenon of the teenager, the revolution in attitudes | 0:50:00 | 0:50:03 | |
towards sex. But one thing that didn't change a bit | 0:50:03 | 0:50:06 | |
was what Wodehouse called "my stuff". | 0:50:06 | 0:50:09 | |
He wanted the world to remain the same. | 0:50:09 | 0:50:12 | |
It was always the same. And not only did he want that | 0:50:12 | 0:50:15 | |
but he kept it the same by writing it the same forever. | 0:50:15 | 0:50:18 | |
He himself said, "I'm a bad case of arrested development." | 0:50:18 | 0:50:21 | |
He never... He was 21 all his life, creatively. | 0:50:21 | 0:50:26 | |
You never met Wodehouse any more than I did, to my great regret. | 0:50:26 | 0:50:29 | |
But what do you think, the fact that he wrote about the same people | 0:50:29 | 0:50:34 | |
-in the same kind of situations... -Yes. -What does that say about him | 0:50:34 | 0:50:38 | |
-as a person? -I suppose you would say, pretty narrow a writer. | 0:50:38 | 0:50:42 | |
And he was obviously a comic writer. That's what he really wanted to do, | 0:50:42 | 0:50:48 | |
and he certainly didn't get in touch with Ibsen anywhere at all. | 0:50:48 | 0:50:53 | |
HE LAUGHS | 0:50:53 | 0:50:54 | |
It was just really there to amuse and make an immense fortune. | 0:50:54 | 0:50:58 | |
He was a writer who wanted to make money. | 0:50:58 | 0:51:01 | |
He said that very clearly from very early on. | 0:51:01 | 0:51:04 | |
And he was incredibly successful at doing that, | 0:51:04 | 0:51:08 | |
and I think he found a formula for making money and pursued that. | 0:51:08 | 0:51:12 | |
It's very important, and true of all really great writers, | 0:51:12 | 0:51:15 | |
that they understand their limitations. | 0:51:15 | 0:51:17 | |
He understood his, and he did what he did as well as he possibly could all his life. | 0:51:17 | 0:51:21 | |
If you have stories that you want to tell, | 0:51:21 | 0:51:24 | |
and if you feel affectionate toward your characters, | 0:51:24 | 0:51:27 | |
and you've still got stories that you have for them, | 0:51:27 | 0:51:30 | |
that you're dreaming up for them, why would you change? | 0:51:30 | 0:51:33 | |
We don't want to see Jeeves in his dotage. | 0:51:33 | 0:51:35 | |
He understood exactly the age those characters belonged at, | 0:51:35 | 0:51:38 | |
and he kept them there for decades. | 0:51:38 | 0:51:41 | |
Nonetheless, the fact that by the late 1960s | 0:51:41 | 0:51:44 | |
he'd been writing about the same characters for decade after decade | 0:51:44 | 0:51:48 | |
did present some problems. | 0:51:48 | 0:51:51 | |
Because in his head, all day every day, | 0:51:51 | 0:51:54 | |
he was thinking about his plot, | 0:51:54 | 0:51:57 | |
and, at the very end of his life, | 0:51:57 | 0:51:59 | |
he said, "This is difficult. I settle down to write a book, | 0:51:59 | 0:52:03 | |
and the hardest question is, have I written this book before?" | 0:52:03 | 0:52:08 | |
"And I have no means, other than reading them all, to be sure." | 0:52:08 | 0:52:12 | |
In 1968, a year of protest around the world, | 0:52:12 | 0:52:16 | |
Christopher MacLehose became Wodehouse's editor | 0:52:16 | 0:52:20 | |
at his London publishing house. | 0:52:20 | 0:52:22 | |
Although he was the most... | 0:52:22 | 0:52:24 | |
I mean, the iconic...comic writer in the world, | 0:52:24 | 0:52:28 | |
he was only, as I remember, selling something like | 0:52:28 | 0:52:32 | |
15,000 or 20,000 hardback books. I mean, that's not a great many. | 0:52:32 | 0:52:35 | |
And this puzzled him. | 0:52:35 | 0:52:37 | |
"Is it true," he would say, that sex and money | 0:52:37 | 0:52:41 | |
were the only things that people wanted to read about in books? | 0:52:41 | 0:52:45 | |
"I can't do that sort of thing," he said. | 0:52:45 | 0:52:47 | |
Wodehouse's work appeared in the magazines | 0:52:47 | 0:52:51 | |
which signified changing times, but for the eternal innocent, | 0:52:51 | 0:52:54 | |
sex remained out of bounds. | 0:52:54 | 0:52:56 | |
In all the Wodehouse work, beds are things you hide something under | 0:52:56 | 0:53:01 | |
or you hide under yourself. They have no other use. | 0:53:01 | 0:53:04 | |
Or you're woken up with your morning tea by your man. | 0:53:04 | 0:53:06 | |
They have no other place in human life. | 0:53:06 | 0:53:09 | |
Of course, when I started writing, sex was absolutely taboo. | 0:53:09 | 0:53:13 | |
You couldn't even hint at it. | 0:53:13 | 0:53:15 | |
I suppose one got set in one's ways. | 0:53:15 | 0:53:18 | |
Certainly he wasn't going to stop writing, | 0:53:18 | 0:53:20 | |
and he certainly wasn't going to change the way he was writing. | 0:53:20 | 0:53:24 | |
But I think he felt remote | 0:53:24 | 0:53:27 | |
from where what you would call the market was, | 0:53:27 | 0:53:31 | |
and that was one of the reasons he didn't ever come back to England. | 0:53:31 | 0:53:35 | |
He honestly felt that, if he had arrived in Southampton - | 0:53:35 | 0:53:39 | |
he would've surely come by sea - | 0:53:39 | 0:53:41 | |
that nobody would have come out to meet him. | 0:53:41 | 0:53:43 | |
I think the truth is quite otherwise. | 0:53:43 | 0:53:45 | |
I think there would've been bunting, a vast crowd of people, | 0:53:45 | 0:53:49 | |
just to set eyes on him, touch his sleeve. | 0:53:49 | 0:53:52 | |
Would you say his life was enormously happy in America? | 0:53:52 | 0:53:57 | |
He cut himself off, I think, from a lot of the realities of life. | 0:53:57 | 0:54:00 | |
It's an understatement - he was desperately sad not to come back | 0:54:00 | 0:54:05 | |
to this country. | 0:54:05 | 0:54:07 | |
Did he miss England? Did he ask you about how things were? | 0:54:07 | 0:54:11 | |
I think there were three things he wanted above all else - | 0:54:11 | 0:54:14 | |
to see rural England... | 0:54:14 | 0:54:17 | |
One was to, I think, get back to Dulwich, | 0:54:17 | 0:54:21 | |
just go to Dulwich and see it, walk round it and talk, | 0:54:21 | 0:54:25 | |
and go to a test match, a cricket test match. | 0:54:25 | 0:54:29 | |
Although past his 90th birthday, | 0:54:29 | 0:54:31 | |
Wodehouse still talked of returning to England. | 0:54:31 | 0:54:35 | |
I don't know if I'd find it very altered. I suppose I would. | 0:54:35 | 0:54:39 | |
After all, 30... How long is it? 30 years, isn't it? Long time. | 0:54:39 | 0:54:44 | |
'In the meantime he carried on writing, | 0:54:44 | 0:54:47 | |
'as he always had, amid signs that an old error of judgement | 0:54:47 | 0:54:50 | |
'had been forgiven. To his delight, a library at Dulwich College | 0:54:50 | 0:54:53 | |
'was named in his honour.' | 0:54:53 | 0:54:56 | |
He was measured for a waxwork at Madame Tussauds. | 0:54:56 | 0:55:00 | |
And then came the final act of rehabilitation. | 0:55:00 | 0:55:04 | |
PG Wodehouse gets to 90, and finally gets the knighthood. | 0:55:04 | 0:55:09 | |
I think he was thrilled by that. There'd been a big debate | 0:55:09 | 0:55:12 | |
within the British Establishment during the Wilson-Heath years. | 0:55:12 | 0:55:16 | |
Wilson was in favour of it, | 0:55:16 | 0:55:19 | |
and finally it was given in January '75, | 0:55:19 | 0:55:21 | |
the same batch, so to speak, as Charlie Chaplin. | 0:55:21 | 0:55:25 | |
And Wodehouse said a rather lovely thing. | 0:55:25 | 0:55:27 | |
When the news came through, he said, "So, that's that, then." | 0:55:27 | 0:55:31 | |
He'd been absolved, and he'd had his... He'd been given his pardon. | 0:55:31 | 0:55:35 | |
I think it's a sort of graceful act on the part of the government, | 0:55:35 | 0:55:39 | |
sort of more or less saying, "Well, that's that," you know. | 0:55:39 | 0:55:43 | |
But sadly the knighthood in some ways was the end of him, | 0:55:43 | 0:55:46 | |
because he was swamped with fan mail. He felt obliged to answer it, | 0:55:46 | 0:55:49 | |
and he developed a skin condition, went into hospital, | 0:55:49 | 0:55:52 | |
had a heart attack and he died, on St Valentine's Day '75. | 0:55:52 | 0:55:56 | |
Good writers normally deal with death, suffering, pain, | 0:55:58 | 0:56:01 | |
divorce, adultery and sexuality. | 0:56:01 | 0:56:06 | |
He avoids all those things, writes magnificent books, | 0:56:06 | 0:56:10 | |
and manages to write books that will be read | 0:56:10 | 0:56:14 | |
as long as anybody else's books. | 0:56:14 | 0:56:17 | |
Wodehouse has created characters that live for people | 0:56:17 | 0:56:20 | |
who've never picked up one of the novels, | 0:56:20 | 0:56:23 | |
and that is the sign of a really great writer. | 0:56:23 | 0:56:25 | |
You create a character that walks off the pages | 0:56:25 | 0:56:27 | |
and into the world. Amazing. | 0:56:27 | 0:56:30 | |
I find that, whatever the circumstances... | 0:56:30 | 0:56:32 | |
There was a point where my daughter was very desperately ill, | 0:56:32 | 0:56:36 | |
and the only thing I could do was read Wodehouse. | 0:56:36 | 0:56:38 | |
It got me through the most hideous time. | 0:56:38 | 0:56:41 | |
He's also left behind a feeling that... | 0:56:41 | 0:56:44 | |
you can be funny without being cruel. | 0:56:44 | 0:56:48 | |
You can be nice and charming without being boring. | 0:56:48 | 0:56:53 | |
I love that. | 0:56:53 | 0:56:55 | |
The people I most envy on Earth | 0:56:55 | 0:56:57 | |
are those who've never read any Wodehouse, | 0:56:57 | 0:56:59 | |
who pick up their first book, because they now have 90 books | 0:56:59 | 0:57:03 | |
to get through, and people have such sheer pleasure ahead of them. | 0:57:03 | 0:57:08 | |
There's no pleasure I know like it, and I envy them. | 0:57:08 | 0:57:12 | |
'After his death, the items which had been so much a part | 0:57:12 | 0:57:15 | |
'of his long working life were sent to Dulwich College, | 0:57:15 | 0:57:18 | |
'and reside in the Wodehouse Library.' | 0:57:18 | 0:57:21 | |
Here we are. | 0:57:21 | 0:57:23 | |
The great man's study, | 0:57:24 | 0:57:27 | |
brought across from Long Island in New York. | 0:57:27 | 0:57:32 | |
Wodehouse used to write down ideas in pencil. | 0:57:32 | 0:57:37 | |
"Man with horror of cats, like Lord Roberts, | 0:57:37 | 0:57:40 | |
falls in love with a girl who keeps cats." | 0:57:40 | 0:57:44 | |
Look at all this! | 0:57:44 | 0:57:46 | |
The Royal typewriter. This was his first book, I think. | 0:57:46 | 0:57:50 | |
Yeah. | 0:57:50 | 0:57:52 | |
The Pothunters. | 0:57:52 | 0:57:54 | |
-HE LAUGHS -Very public school! | 0:57:54 | 0:57:57 | |
The Pothunters. | 0:57:57 | 0:57:59 | |
"To William Townend, these first fruits | 0:57:59 | 0:58:02 | |
of a genius at which the world will (shortly) be amazed, | 0:58:02 | 0:58:07 | |
(you see if it won't), from the author, PG Wodehouse." | 0:58:07 | 0:58:11 | |
I wonder - modest, kindly, innocent man that he was - | 0:58:11 | 0:58:16 | |
I wonder if he realised just how much of a genius he was, | 0:58:16 | 0:58:20 | |
and how much those words would come true. | 0:58:20 | 0:58:25 | |
The world would be amazed. | 0:58:25 | 0:58:27 | |
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd | 0:58:52 | 0:58:56 | |
E-mail [email protected] | 0:58:56 | 0:59:00 | |
. | 0:59:00 | 0:59:01 |