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Program Title
Intro JEEVES AND WOOSTER, SERIES III/Episode 2/Intro by Russell Baker Good evening. I'm Russell Baker. Tonight's tale in the adventures of Jeeves and Bertie Wooster finds Bertie still in New York and liking it so much he's thinking of settling there. Bertie's creator, P.G. Wodehouse, did in fact settle there in the early part of the century and made a great deal of money writing for American magazines and working in the theater with Jerome Kern. Like a lot of writers in those days, he went to Hollywood long enough to make a lot of money, came back with a lot of material for stories about Dottyville-on-the-Pacific, and lost a lot of money in 1929. He lived on Park Avenue after World War Two, then moved out to Long Island, after suffering a minor stroke in his seventies, and there he lived until is death twenty years later. Bertie Wooster's New York of course isn't meant to be the real thing. There's always the feel of Never-Never Land in the settings where Wodehouse plunks poor Bertie down. These are fairy tales for grown-ups. Worrying about authenticity will spoil them. However, Wodehouse is conjuring up an authentic piece of the past when he deals with Bertie's skimmer. That's a certain kind of straw hat. The heyday of the skimmer is long past, but you'll see men shamelessly flaunting them in old photographs of the 1920's. In those days the skimmer must have seemed the height of fashion, just as Nehru jackets later became a fashion fad that most men who bought one would now like to forget. One problem tonight for Jeeves, with his faultless eye for the grotesque, is to get that hideous skimmer out of his life. He will also have to outwit blackmailers and stave off the dreadful Honoria Glossop. Jeeves and Wooster, Episode Two. Extro JEEVES AND WOOSTER, SERIES III/Episode 2/Extro by Russell Baker You noticed that when Bertie and Jeeves headed back to England they didn't hop in one of those jet-powered tin cans that now shoot us across the Atlantic between dinner and dawn. They went the civilized way - by ocean liner. That's almost impossible to do nowadays. In Bertie's day, however, it was the only way to go... Jets doomed the ocean liners, except for vacation cruising. Tonight's shipboard scenes show what's been lost. The cabins were big, the beds comfortable, the bars enormous, and the drinks practically free. The dining room aboard the France, Craig Claiborne said, was the best restaurant in the world. There were swimming pools, skeet shooting, gymnasiums, millionaires and movie stars, and the crossing from New York took five days - long enough to put on several pounds, make a dozen new friends, or start a love affair. It was, in short, the best way to go that ever was.... The liner you glimpsed sailing out of New York Harbor was the S.S. United States, which holds the all-time speed record for an Atlantic crossing. Jeeves would never have let Bertie take the United States ... the only proper way for a proper Englishman to go was aboard one of Britain's Cunard Liners ... preferably the Queen Mary. Anyhow, when you're traveling like that, what's the hurry? Goodnight.  Episode number: 1 2 3 4
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