In praise of Plum

This blog post is not going to say anything original. You’ll have read it all before. Its sole purpose is to convince you that P.G. Wodehouse is the master so everyone else should give up, particularly the people who’ve tried to adapt Blandings for the telly.

Blandings on TV is not all that bad. I’ve laughed at the gentler moments of farce. Some of the dialogue sparkles. The performances are good-ish. The setting has some charm. But I’m inclined to agree with everyone else who has spent brain power on it: the screen can’t do Wodehouse.

My father once told me that he kept copies of The Code of the Woosters and Right Ho, Jeeves in his desk at work. He referred to them, he said, whenever he suspected that his prose had grown pallid. Read a few pages, he said, and the colour returned.

The old man’s message was not to mimic Wodehouse’s humour (one cannot), but observe the simplicity of the style and structure.