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Program Title
Credits Producer: Brian Eastman Director: Ferdinand Fairfax Intro JEEVES AND WOOSTER, SERIES III/Episode 1/Intro by Russell Baker Good Evening, I’m Russell Baker. These next few weeks we’ll be re-visiting one of the funniest men who ever wrote in the English language. He is P.G..Wodehouse - spelled Wodehouse, pronounced Woodhouse. Known to his friends as ‘Plum.’ He was born in 1881, lived to age 93, and in 93 years he published 93 books. He was English, of course, and though he lived the last half of his life in America, it was the English that he wrote about to the end. Even when he set his stories in America, as we’ll see tonight, he filled them with English people behaving like - well - English people. It’s hard to realize now how popular Wodehouse was back in the 1920s and ‘30s. In the early Depression when I was a boy on roller skates selling the Saturday Evening Post door-to-door in New Jersey, a new Wodehouse story was always announced in big type on the cover... and was bound to sell a few extra copies in that sad town where tastes ran heavily toward "True Detective"... 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. Which brings us to Bertie Wooster the downright lovable man-about-town-and-country who, with his man Jeeves, is at the center of tonight’s events. Many years ago congressman Tom Reid of Maine said of a colleague: "With a few more brains, he could be a half-wit." He might have been speaking of Bertie Wooster. If Bertie lacks brains however, he is redeemed by sweetness of character and his absolute dependence on Jeeves. Jeeves: He is every man’s dream of a gentleman’s gentleman: not only a model of brainpower, poise and cunning, but a master bartender, tailoring expert, and psychologist. Tonight’s episode finds Bertie safely installed in New York but surrounded by dangers. Among them - Slingsby’s Superb Soup, terrifying Aunt Agatha and a painter named Gladys.... spelled with a "W"... Jeeves and Wooster, Episode One  Episode number: 1 2 3 4
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