Wodehouse Playhouse: Complete Collection

Into the "Playhouse"
P.G. Wodehouse wrote a staggering number of plays, short stories and novels over the course of his life. And while the stories about dim peer Bertie Wooster and his genius manservant Jeeves are the best known, the short films by husband-and-wife team Pauline Collins and John Alderton are enormous fun.

Among the kooky stories: Romance between a pair of ethereal young poets are threatened by a family curse -- which causes an urge to hunt animals. A stammering Mulliner struggles to overcome his "slight hesitance," so he can tell the girl he loves that he loves her. Mischievous Bobbie Wickham spins a web of lies to get rid of a dorky suitor. A young interior decorator finds that the only thing standing between him and his beloved is her very imposing mother... unless he can use her mystery novel against her, and several other stories of love, misunderstandings, and shooting elderly men with airguns.

If the author himself introduces each first-season episode, you can...

The best of all Wodehouse television
The third major British Wodehouse television series consisted of twenty stories developed to half-hour form as Wodehouse Playhouse. Most of the source material were the Mulliner stories, with a few others of Golf and the Drones club. The series was broadcast in the United States over Public Television, and subsequently syndicated to many local PBS stations well into the 1980s, before finally appearing in home video in 2003.

The television screen naturally opened up new storytelling possibilities not available in prose. For instance, "Big Business" was able to use a recording of Paul Robeson singing "Ol' Man River" when Reginald Mulliner is supposed to have been sad enough to express it with the proper emotion, adding a new layer of comedy to what could only be hinted at in the original story. However, even when elaborating on the original, David Climie's scripts frequently used dialogue and scenes directly from the stories, and managed to create a near-seamless...

The Playhouse is the thing.
At first glance this would appear to be yet another result of the current revival of British humorist P.G. Wodehouse, who, to put it lightly, is a worldwide phenomenon. Given the stellar treatment of his most popular duo in Granada Television's four season series, Jeeves and Wooster, one might think this the small screen follow-on of his other characters and books. In fact, these BBC shows date from the mid- '70s, and only recently made their DVD debut in the U.S.

"Playhouse" here is used in the old sense to mean minimal sets and staging, with an ensemble troupe consisting primarily of John Alderton and Pauline Collins, both known from "Upstairs, Downstairs", an early presentation in the U.S. on "Masterpiece Theater", as well as in numerous British shows. Both are also known to SF fans also, Alderton from the cult film Zardoz, and Collins from Dr. Who.

There have been numerous attempts to bring Wodehouse to the big screen, to radio, and in a limited way, to TV,...

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