Jeeves

and

Wooster

ITERATURE is full of blissfully contented male couples, joined together in companionship that no woman can put asunder. Sherlock had Watson, Hawkeye had Chingachgook, Don Quixote had Sancho, and Robinson Crusoe was the first person in history to say "Thank God It's Friday."

But only in England could we find such a satisfactory male duet as Jeeves and Bertie Wooster, the dive-and-take pair who share the same quarters and care for each other - Jeeves with a manservant's devotion to his master, and Wooster with his family's money. I could be called a match made in heaven if it weren't for the fact that the match was made by writer P.G. Wodehouse, consummated by Britain's Granada TV, and brought to full flower on Masterpiece Theatre for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health. American audiences were both delighted and puzzled by the series of man and master situations. While Jeeves and Wooster may be perfectly understandable to the English, they often appeared to defy the laws of social gravity on this side of the Atlantic. Jeeves, with his mannered reserve and calm rationality, frequently takes charge of Wooster, whose impetuousness needs tempering and whose muddleheadedness needs guidance. The distance between the two men was created by class distinctions based on an unwritten code of the superiority of inherited status, wealth, and education, which has dictated the behavior of the British for hundreds of years, regardless of whether they are at home or on a rubber plantation in Malaysia. But any viewers who worry too much about credibility are missing the point: Jeeves and Wooster are good fun, and their silly predicaments are designed to entertain without intellectual distractions of any nature. As Stephen Fry (Jeeves) says, "Theirs is a wonderful world, that one just wants to dive into it, like being able to dive into a soufflé."

"Wodehouse described Jeeves' cough as 'like a sheep clearing its throat of a blade of grass on a distant hillside.' I tried practicing that but sounded more like a goat clearing its throat of a piece of cheese on a nearby hillside. These things are difficult." - Stephen Fry

"Bertie, it is young men like you who make a person with the future of the race at heart despair." - Aunt Agatha

Early Wodehouse Fans As a precocious 11-year-old, Stephen Fry was enchanted by the works of comic novelist P. G. Wodehouse. At 15, he wrote Wodehouse a fan letter and received an autographed photo in return. During the filming of Jeeves and Wooster, the photo stood on his dressing-room table as a good-luck charm. Hugh Laurie also caught the Wodehouse bug early on. When assigned to write a school essay about some period in which he would like to have lived, Laurie chose the gentle era of Wodehouse's 1920's and 1930's. "I was crestfallen afterwards to be taken aside and told that none of that ever existed," Laurie said. "Being told there was no such world was like that ghastly moment when you're told there is no Father Christmas."

The Odd Couple Wodehouse begins their partnership when Bertram Wooster, the young man-about-Mayfair, is suffering from the effects of Boat Race night. Bertie staggers home to find on his doorstep a grave-looking, rather portly man impeccably dressed in morning coat and trousers. "I was sent by the agency, Sir. I was given to understand that you need a valet. My name is Jeeves..." And so Jeeves dutifully awaits his master's beck and call from wherever it might come - the back of Wooster's car, his bed, his club, a country estate of one of his school chums. The one great menace that lurks in the background of many episodes is Honoria Glosssop, Bertie's predatory girlfriend. She is determined to marry Bertie and bring an end to his happy bachelorhood, which would also be a threat to Jeeves, as well, because it would mean that Mrs. Wooster would run the household. Like Bertie and Honoria, all the characters in each episode generally work at cross-purposes, whether they are attempting to repair the plumbing in a grand country house or trying to locate a stolen necklace. Through it all, Jeeves remains steadfastly in control.

The unflappable Jeeves and his overwrought employer were familiar to an older generation of Americans who had grown up with Wodehouse characters in books as well as countless Saturday Evening Post stories in the twenties and thirties, but they were new faces to younger viewers who hadn't yet discovered the laugh-out-loud pleasure to be found in Wodehouse books. There's an innocence about the characters that is particularly appealing, as Evelyn Waugh so beautifully explained: "Wodehouse characters have never tasted the forbidden fruit. They are still in Eden, the Gardens of Blandings Castle, from which we are all exiled." Wodehouse created the characters in 1915m when they were already relics of the Edwardian age, and continued to write about them for six decades, just as if their world hadn't even lost a cuff link. "There's always the feel of Never-Never Land in the settings where Wodehouse plunks poor Bertie down," explained Russell Baker. "There are fairy tales for grown-ups. Worrying about authenticity will spoil them."

"Bertie is such a good soul. His whole aim in life is to help his idiot friends out of trouble, and he really has no thought of self. You can imagine that he'd be very good company. His use of language is so fabulous that just asking you if you'd like a cup of tea would become an event." - Hugh Laurie

"[Wodehouse's world is] quite sui generis and prelapsarian." - Stephen Fry

"One day when Wodehouse was just in his eighties, he told me that his books had taken a new lease on life in the Soviet Union. For the same reason, he said, that the Russians were gobbling up the grimmer works of Charles Dickens - Oliver Twist, Little Detroit, Hard Times. Dickens, he explained, showed the Russians how the faces of the English laboring poor (never min the date) were being ground down. And Wodehouse's Bertie Wooster and his friends of the Drones Club revealed the heartless types who were doing the grinding." - Alistair Cooke

"There is this extraordinary good will that exists between Jeeves and Wooster, though people do tend to think of Jeeves as being incredibly snooty and haughty, which he isn't, and of Bertie Wooster as some kind of yammering ass, which he isn't. He's very intelligent. After all, Bertie wrote these books. The extraordinary language in them is Bertie's language." - Stephen Fry
"In creating Jeeves, Wodehouse has done something which may respectfully be compared to the work of the Almighty in Michelangelo's painting. He has formed a man filled with the breath of life ... If, in say 50 years, Jeeves shall have faded, then what we have so long called England will no longer be." -Hilaire Belloc

The Two Classes of Gentlemen's Clubs The gentlemens' clubs of London were a very important part of the genteel world of the twenties, and Wodehouse's satire of them is continuous and hilarious. While American club life tends to be business oriented, the British clubs are elegant clandestine establishments designed to serve as escapes form the responsibilities - and often the drabness - of their members' home lives. Wooster's club is The Drones, whose exclusively upper-class members are invariably shown in their beautifully furnished clubrooms jumping on sofas, playing catch with cricket balls, or throwing dinner rolls at one another. Jeeves' club is the Ganymede, whose equally exclusive membership is composed of butlers, valets, gentlemen's gentlemen, and other in the upper reached of London's servant class. The Ganymede clubrooms are as elegant as The Drones', but the behavior of the Ganymede members is impeccable. The club names themselves are a deft malicious touch. Drones, of course, are the stingless mail bees that make no honey and live off the work of other bees. Ganymede, in classic mythology, is the cup-bearer to the gods.

The difficult task of translating the stories from the printed page to a television script fell to Clive Exton, who succeeded beautifully capturing the charm and humor. Each episode is actually an amalgam drawn from several stories. The next task, moving from printed script to dramatic action, required performers capable of acting lighthearted without being silly or teetering into camp. If performers don't have that special timing that comedy requires, they aren't likely to acquire it. That's the reason why many otherwise fine actors never even attempt comedy. Jeremy Brett, TV's Sherlock Holmes, says, "The trick to playing light comedy is to swallow a secret smile, then babble on." By a stroke of good fortune, producer Robert Young and director Brian Eastman sound just the right pair of swallowing performers - Stephen Fry, who smiles secretly, and Hugh Laurie, who babbles on. A Bit of Fry and Laurie The first meeting of Fry and Laurie was quite different from that between Jeeves and Wooster. They were introduced by Emma Thompson (Fortunes of War, Much Ado About Nothing) when they were undergraduates at Cambridge, and the two men have remained best friends ever since. In 1981 the trio appeared in the university's Footlights Revue. During the 1980s A Bit of Fry and Laurie had a successful run on British television.

When they were offered the roles of Jeeves and Wooster, these two admirers of Wodehouse thought it best to decline because they were afraid of antagonizing the millions of other fans all over the world, each of whom already knew precisely how the characters should look. They needn't have worried. Once viewers see them, it is difficult to imagine anyone else in the roles. It is equally difficult imagining anyone else other than Wodehouse as the creator of these characters. Due in part to the lasting public affection for Jeeves, Bertie, and his other characters, Wodehouse was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1975, though he had exiled himself from England since the 1940s. (During World War II British authorities had denounced Wodehouse for having made five radio broadcasts of Nazi propaganda to then-neutral America during his imprisonment - reportedly a comfortable one - in a German camp in France.) Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse died on Long Island, New York, in 1975 at the age of 93. But he is still very much alive as simply "P. G." on Masterpiece Theatre.	"The typical Wodehouse story was a genial assault on the British class system. His targets were Britain's well-heeled, well-born, empty-headed upper-class twits. It was the sweetest satire ever written. Wodehouse was blessed with a power that's very rare in this kind of writing. He could make the swells look silly without being mean about it." - Russell Baker
	It has been reported that the Queen Mother said she reads the Jeeves and Wooster stories every night so she can go to bed "with a smile on my face despite the strains of the day."