Adapting Wodehouse for the radio is a challenge – but the BBC has succeeded brilliantly

Everyone knows a Lord Emsworth. Mine lives south of the river and wears caterpillars in his hair and wine on his shirt and has just occasionally written for this magazine. That doesn’t much narrow it down. When you look at him, you understand a little better why P. G. Wodehouse is topping the lists of authors to read during lockdown. It’s not just that the books are funny. With an Emsworth or a Bertie Wooster you’re guaranteed that idling and dithering will land you somewhere. Even if it is in the soup.

Adapted for Radio 4 this fortnight, Leave it to Psmith, the second in Wodehouse’s Blandings series, sees the dithering Earl invite a prospective thief into his home after mistaking him for a Canadian poet. Emsworth’s sister, the imperious Constance, has arranged for the Earl and the poet to have lunch. The only trouble is that neither knows what the poet looks like. Emsworth’s hopeless son Freddie is meanwhile plotting to steal his aunt’s necklace to fund his latest hare-brained scheme.

Airing on Sunday afternoons, the two-parter is produced by Jarvis & Ayres, the husband and wife team behind some of the most enjoyable recent renditions of Wodehouse’s classics. Martin Jarvis, who has played Jeeves on Broadway and carried a successful Wodehouse one-man show, is brilliant as the bumbling Emsworth. He does not so much deliver his lines as force them out from a supine position on a club banquette. Patricia Hodge makes a delightfully stern Constance: ‘Clarence, stand up straight, you’re drooping like a damp sock.’

Leave it to Psmith is a challenge for radio, requiring numerous scene changes and sleights of hand to reveal a string of cases of mistaken identity.