My Best Reader and I were given a set of the Jeeves & Wooster television series that star Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry. They may have been my introduction to Mr. Laurie and Mr. Fry. It’s possible I saw a Blackadder episode or two before seeing J&W, but not very many, and I think I remember recognizing Mr. Fry when I saw Peter’s Friends. I may well have seen the “Bambi” episode of The Young Ones before that, but I wouldn’t have recognized or remembered them from it (although I did recognize the great Griff Rhys-Jones) so it doesn’t count anyway. So to some extent, Fry and Laurie are Jeeves and Wooster, no matter what else they do.
It must be odd for those who only know Mr. Laurie from House to come across his Bertie, although I think they would recognize his ability to say things like toodle-pip and oojah-cum-spiff not only with perfect conviction but trouser-threateningly hilariously. It’s much the same these days, but with things like necrotic paronichia and pleurosodium phosteromine. But still. It’s like the difference between those people who first came across Anthony Hopkins as a ferociously polite serial killer and those who came across him as a nebbishy bookseller with a romantic heart. We can appreciate the other side, but that’s not really him.
But back to P.G. Wodehouse, from whose stories the television show were of course taken. I read vast quantities of Mr. Wodehouse’s stuff during my misspent youth, and at some point decided that I really didn’t care for the Bertie and Jeeves stuff that much, compared with the standalone novels, Uncle Fred, Blandings Castle and of course Psmith. So I haven’t reread them in ever so long. Watching the television series, I was seized by the desire to reread the story of the Great Sermon Handicap, and it happened that for some reason (I seriously do not know why) I own a copy of The Inimitable Jeeves. The volume is one of those ones that collects a bunch of magazine stories and edits them a bit and calls it a novel; it doesn’t quite work, but it doesn’t quite fail, either. The stories, of course, are made of funny (caution: humor product may contain corn), which helps me not mind so much that it isn’t a proper novel.
The stories and television series make for an interesting question about adaptation; much of the dialogue is taken verbatim, but all switched around from story to story, and story subplots are jammed together and switched from story to story, and bits are taken from Bingo and given to Tuppy and so on and so forth, and yet it not only works on television, but feels very true to the stories. There are a few places that I wonder why they made the change, but on the whole, the changes make perfect sense as part of the adaptation, and are admirable despite being, you know, changes.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.