In sympathy with Bertie Wooster

Fry & Laurie as "Jeeves & Wooster"

My PEI traveling companion (a Canadian by the way) has sent me the "Jeeves & Wooster" Granada TV series on DVD for Christmas.  In this wonderful comedy series, Hugh Laurie (yes, Emmy winning Hugh Laurie of "House" fame) plays to perfection the part of upper crust British gentleman, Bertie Wooster. Steven Fry plays his perfect foil, the "gentleman's gentleman", only known to us as "Jeeves."

The Jeeves & Wooster books were famously written by comic writer PG Wodehouse.  Hugh Laurie, who seems to have had a troubled childhood, and has given great credit to Wodehouse for having "saved" his life.  

I really couldn't say it better as concerns my own teenage years and having stumbled upon LM Montgomery's "Anne of Green Gables" that day in my church library.

Laurie says it so well for me that I will quote him here.  You only need substitute "LM Montgomery" for "PG Wodehouse" and there you will have my own experience.

Hats off to Montgomery and to Wodehouse for credit due!


"Glancing over my school reports from the year 1972, I observe that the words "ghastly" and "desperate" feature strongly, while "no", "not", "never" and "again" also crop up more often than one would expect in a random sample. My history teacher's report actually took the form of a postcard from Vancouver.


But this, you will be nauseated to learn, is a tale of redemption. In about my 13th year, it so happened that a copy of Galahad at Blandings by P. G. Wodehouse entered my squalid universe, and things quickly began to change. From the very first sentence of my very first Wodehouse story, life appeared to grow somehow larger. There had always been height, depth, width and time, and in these prosaic dimensions I had hitherto snarled, cursed, and not washed my hair. But now, suddenly, there was Wodehouse, and the discovery seemed to make me gentler every day. By the middle of the fifth chapter I was able to use a knife and fork, and I like to think that I have made reasonable strides since.


I spent the following couple of years meandering happily back and forth through Blandings Castle and its environs - learning how often the trains ran, at what times the post was collected, how one could tell if the Empress was off-colour, why the Emsworth Arms was preferable to the Blue Boar - until the time came for me to roll up the map of adolescence and set forth into my first Jeeves novel. It was The Code of the Woosters, and things, as they used to say, would never be the same again."

Jeeves & Wooster