More hits than misses

keith-moyes

I missed this series in its many TV outings and have only just caught up with it on DVD. Knowing how much Fry and Laurie love Wodehouse, I was hoping for good things. Overall, I am slightly disappointed with it, but it is still enjoyable and I wouldn't want to discourage anybody from giving it a view.

Stephen Fry was born to play Jeeves, but Hugh Laurie's Wooster is too broad for my taste. His mugging and 'silly ass' mannerisms are overdone, particularly in the first two seasons. However, he does tone them down after that and the shows benefit as a result.

Surprisingly, this appears to be only the second attempt to televise what is undoubtedly one of the great literary double-acts of the Twentieth Century. There was a series in the 60s, with Dennis Price and Ian Carmichael, but Wodehouse was scathing about Carmichael's 'middle-aged travesty' of Wooster, so it probably wasn't much good.

There may be a reason for this relative neglect. Good books don't always make good dramas and I think Wodehouse gave the screenwriter (Clive Exton) a couple of problems which he never entirely solved.

Firstly, the material doesn't really fit the fifty-minute format. The short stories are slightly too short and the novels are far too long.

Exton's approach to the short stories is to intertwine two (or more) into a single episode. This is usually done quite adroitly, but often the individual stories lose crucial scenes and fail to build up their full comic momentum. In most cases, I think it would have been better to stretch single stories to the required length rather than to condense them in this way.

With the novels he took three different approaches. Some he pared down to the bare bones, retaining the central story elements but stripping away all the sub-plots. In others, he pulls the different sub-plots apart and reassembles them as two separate, consecutive, stories. Neither approach really works. Wodehouse took great care with his plot construction. Much of the humour in the novels is in the way that incident piles on incident, so that poor old Wooster's life becomes 'one damn thing after another'.

Only once does Exton simply break the novel in half and present it as a two-part story. Even here, he has to simplify too much (there is probably enough material for three episodes).

The second problem is more fundamental and may be insoluble. While the incidents and the characters are funny in themselves, the genius of the books lies in Bertie Wooster's unique narrative voice, with its evocative slang and its elaborate hyperbole. The books are not just about what happens, but how Wooster perceives and relates it. He turns 'making mountains out of molehills' into high art.

It is the same with characters. No actual Aunt Agatha can possibly be the intimidating old dragon of Wooster's imagination. This is even more true of the wonderful Madeleine Basset. She can be depicted accurately and amusingly (Elizabeth Morton has a good stab at it) but no performance can hope to be as droll as Bertie's designation of her: "a droopy, soupy, sentimental article."

Of course, Exton could have given Wooster a voice-over, but there would be a danger of making the shows too wordy. As it is, he obviously felt that some of the stories were a bit short on physical action. To strengthen them visually, he makes radical changes to the plots and adds scenes and bits of physical comedy that have no counterpart in the books. Sometimes these amendments work well and the slapstick elements integrate seamlessly into the general tone of the stories, but on other occasions he is less successful. There are a couple of truly terrible ideas that Fry and Laurie should simply have refused to sanction. In particular, putting Wooster in drag was deplorable enough, but Jeeves in drag was unforgivable: shame on you, Mr Exton.

The great Jeeves and Wooster series has yet to be made. However, if P G Wodehouse is to your taste, then this series has more hits than misses.

Only the most uncompromising Wodehouse purists will fail to get enjoyment out of it.

PS: If any actor wants to know how to play Bertie Wooster he should check out the audio books read by Jonathan Cecil. He is spot on.

score 6/10

keith-moyes 12 January 2010

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw2190315/