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Program Title
Intro JEEVES AND WOOSTER, SERIES III/Episode 3/Intro by Russell Baker Good evening, I'm Russell Baker. Tonight we have another installment in the adventures of the social butterfly and dim bulb Bertie Wooster and his brilliant valet, Jeeves. They've arrived home in London after jumping off an ocean liner in the middle of the Atlantic. How they survived we will never know. They had apparently been wandering for months on several oceans - but how they traveled - whether on life preservers or a lifeboat dropped from a passing freighter - will always be a mystery. That's because it's the kind of boring detail that simply didn't matter to P.G. Wodehouse. He wasn't interested in creating a plausible story. He was inventing a world not much different from the fairy-tale world of Hans Christian Andersen. It was a world in which pigs could have wings and men who dived off ships in mid-ocean could turn up months later in London with no explanation whatever. Wodehouse himself said it was Never-Never Land. Which is interesting because Never-Never Land was where Peter Pan lived, and Peter Pan, of course, was the boy who never grew up. Wodehouse was born in 1881, so he was only twenty-three when Sir James Barrie first put Peter Pan on the London stage. Whether he was affected by it, or whether Peter Pan Syndrome - "Never Grow Up" - was just something in the cultural air of the Edwardian Age. Wodehouse's writing seems tailored especially for people who think Peter had the right idea. So tonight Bertie and Jeeves are back in London and about to become involved with the cultivation of mustaches and a short-tempered lover named Cheesewright, whose nickname is Stilton. Jeeves and Wooster, Episode Three. Extro JEEVES AND WOOSTER, SERIES III/Episode 3/Extro by Russell Baker There are many disagreements between Americans and the English about what's funny, and one of the sharpest involves men dressing up in women's clothes. Maybe because Puritanism hangs on so firmly in America, we don't find men in drag as hilarious as the British do. In America it has a long association with male homosexuality ... and obsessed as we are with sex, the sight of a man in woman's clothes may set off alarms in uptight Americans that make it hard to laugh freely. On the other hand, what in the world is there about it that make the British roll in the aisles. Benny Hill prancing around in a dress could put British studio audiences into ecstasies of laughter. "Charley's Aunt," a play in which a male character has to impersonate a woman, will never die if it's true that there will always be an England. The British obviously see nothing lewd or salacious about drag. Bawdy perhaps, but not nasty. I still remember on my first visit to London being in a sold-out audience at the huge London Palladium. They had packed the house to see a one-man show by a female impersonator named Danny Larue. The audience looked like the soul of the British middle class. Moms and dads, old folks, tots and teenagers, all breaking up with uncontrollable laughter. Maybe it's because the British have more experience with this kind of show business. In Shakespeare's theater, after all, men played all the female roles from Romeo's Juliet to Lady Macbeth. I'm Russell Baker. goodnight.  Episode number: 1 2 3 4
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