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throw away. Society Dinner 2006 Report and Photos (click here) Dinner photos (click here) Click here for a report on the 21 October 2004 formal dinner (now with photographs) So We Met Mr Mulliner The fourth and final Radio 4 episode of More Mr Mulliner, broadcast on Friday, February 27, dealt with “The Truth About George”. This is a tale that a politically correct age would not accept from a new writer, because – as with the continuing theme of the Ronnie Barker “Open All Hours” TV series – much of the fun centres on disability. True, speech disability rather than anything more physical, but still disability, and no doubt intensely painful to those afflicted. Roger Davenport’s dramatisation spared us nothing: George Mulliner was required to stammer his way through much of his dialogue, and it was hard to take. Again, as my fellow critics have observed of earlier episodes, you wonder why certain changes were made. Do scriptwriters believe they can improve on PGW? We all have come across the very occasional word or phrase in the oeuvre we should wish to see adjusted – but not in the regular fashion heard here. At the same time, you must have sympathy with the dramatist seeking to convey a picturesque Wodehousean phrase by atmosphere alone (there is a limit to how much description can be allowed). The specialist George visits in the attempt to cure his stammer is “a kindly man with moth-eaten whiskers and an eye like a meditative codfish”, according to PGW. Davenport understandably gave up, made him a Scot – and left it at that. This visit brought up a specific irritant: Peter Darney as George had a perfectly acceptable light baritone, which immediately wrecked that pleasing cameo in the original when his efforts cause the specialist to wince. “He had a sensitive ear.” Director Ned Chaillet could surely have persuaded Darney to sing off-key. The key railway platform confrontation with the Emperor of Abyssinia was done nicely with expanded dialogue, although the escapee (Martyn Hyder) did sound a little too alert and clear-thinking to give a true picture of mental distress. Which of course is where political correctness could enter once again. Why new characters had to be introduced throughout the series, sometimes in very minor, sometimes more significant, roles is hard to follow. Here we found an invented reporter interviewing one of George’s pursuers: in "The Knightly Quest of Mervyn” we met the Countess of Bloxham, unknown to the original (although it was a touch of nostalgia to hear Johanna McCallum, daughter of John McCallum and Googie Withers, in this role). The bar chitchat opening and more particularly rounding off the episodes worked up to a point – but, as Robert Bruce argues below, Mr Mulliner’s very personal summary to each tale in the books is exactly right, and an attempt to embellish it was usually an irritant. Here as in so many areas we are up against the poser: are such presentations aimed at thee and me, Wodehouse buffs from way back, or at a wider audience, in hope of introducing new generations to The Master (like the hope that one-day cricket persuades the newcomer to move on to the full flavor of the two-innings game)? One area of distinct uncertainty throughout seemed to be in the credence placed on Mr Mulliner. Sometimes his story was told straight, and we were invited to believe fully: sometimes there was distinct tongue-in-cheek, with the none-too-subtle hint that Mr Mulliner may not be an angler, but he knows how to tell a fish story. The final episode includes his (invented) comment, “Hard facts are my area, as you know”. Well … Again on the series overall, I fear I disagree with our Remembrancer (see below), as I found Richard Griffiths unconvincing as Mr Mulliner. His tones are simply too lightweight (especially when the actor’s physical bulk is recalled from television sightings), and too youthful to give that full feeling of the ageless sage of the Angler’s Rest. There is not enough gravitas and gentle but firm certainty. But I do endorse fully the Remembrancer’s assessment that Miss Postlethwaite is the wrong vintage: there is no sense here of a satin-clad bosom heaving after that idiot set fire to the waste-paper basket – rather she might almost be in T-shirt and trousers. At the same time, you can only praise the versatility of Matilda Ziegler, switching effortlessly and effectively from Miss Postlethwaite’s Mummerset to society gel or small boy. And I felt one musical usage to be exactly right. The unmistakable sweet melancholy of Jessie Matthews singing “Always look for the silver lining” made a perfect closedown for a period piece, erratic but acceptable overall. Murray Hedgcock The Knightly Quest of Mervyn (Friday, 20 February, Radio 4). I love the Mulliner stories. They were the first Wodehouse that I read, in elderly volumes in the school library. So it is good to have them turned into radio versions which could spread the delight to an ever-wider public. But there is a fundamental problem with Wodehouse on the radio. The stories work their magic through the language, the skill of its use and the resulting delights. On radio narrative has to pull the story along. It cannot be allowed to unfold gently and release its pleasure to the reader. So much of the joy of Wodehouse is bound to be lost. The other problem is the insistence that Wodehouse stories must be wrapped up in a cloak of twenties kitsch if they are to appeal to a general audience. So here we have the delightful Mulliner, redolent of the somnolence of the Anglers’ Rest, all dark wood and a Stout and Mild, having to compete at the opening of the story with the producer’s idea of jolly twenties music. And so it continued through the story. The attempt to grab the listener and tell him or her that this wasn’t really a wittily crafted story but was instead some kind of flapper’s pantomime continued. The City tones of Oofy Prosser are replaced, along with his place as central character in the story, with the American drawl of a millionaire called Nelson Frobisher the Second, hitherto unknown in this story. The whole effect is to coarsen the plot and turn the style into something much more garish. Throughout odd changes occurred. A bar called the ‘Blotto Kitten’ in the story became the ‘Squiffy Kitten’ in the radio version. A policeman refers to Bellamys as a ‘food hall’. Blotsam Castle becomes a ‘dank’ pile rather than the original ‘noble’ pile. Mervyn is shown into the hall rather than the drawing room at Eaton Square. The delightful philosophical ending to the story: ‘He meant well. He did his best. And even of a Mulliner more cannot be said than that’, remained. But it was then diluted with an epilogue of chatter about the prospect of the vicar, rather than the curate in the original story, reciting ‘Dangerous Dan McGrew’. I suppose it was felt that moving a detail from the beginning of the story to the end would let the dramatisation fade away on the pub chatter that Mulliner personifies. But it lost the impact of the moral of the story being underlined and the phlegmatic nature of Mr Mulliner being underscored. These are quibbles, the radio folk might say, the purists are being pedantic again. But none of these additions enhanced the story. Instead they took the story away from Wodehouse and into a blander world. In the bar of the Anglers’ Rest in these stories the most popular drink would not be a pint of stout. It would be a fizzy bottle of Mulliner Lite. Robert Bruce Our remembrancer writes: The Ordeal of Osbert Mulliner Broadcast on Radio 4, Friday 13th February, 2004. The second of a series of four. I have mixed views on this. Like “The Bishop's Move” last week, it was well done and the flavour was right – and that is the main thing. If one has never read the stories, then this series is an excellent introduction. Richard Griffiths has the gravitas of voice we expect to hear from Mr Mulliner, and the actors playing J Bashford Braddock and General Petherick-Soames were equally good. The feel was right, the story was well told, and such criticisms as I have are those of a purist. I have just reread the story, and if the director had followed it word-for-word, we would have had far too much solid narration by Mr Mulliner. This would have made bad radio listening. I accept that changes were necessary in this aspect and I cannot really complain about the insertion of additional scene-setting pub chatter at the beginning. I see no reason, though, for the inserted ‘epilogue’ chatter at the end. It takes away from the excellent ending Wodehouse gave us and weakens the effect considerably. It made the story end, not with a bang, but a whimper. I also suggest it is a pity that the director did not recognise the clichés Wodehouse deliberately used. Thus, when saying goodbye in Wodehouse, someone's future career is ALWAYS to be followed ‘with considerable interest’. Just ‘with interest’ spoils the rhythm entirely. Similarly, Wodehouse would have said ‘with sickening clarity’, not ‘sickening clearness’. And I also regret that today’s political correctness meant that Cohen Bros of Covent Garden, well known to all Wodehouseans, had to become Pavel's Emporium. Finally, Miss Postlethwaite should change her voice. She is not a simple country lass speaking ‘Mummerset’; she is a middle-aged lady very conscious of her dignity. She stands for ‘no nonsense’ in her bar and her voice would be far more ‘refained’. But I compliment the producer on one thing. The credits include: “the Anglers’ Rest was played by the Old Mitre, London”. All right-thinking Londoners will recognise this immediately as Ye Old Mitre, off Ely Place. A nice tribute to one of London oldest and cosiest pubs, which still has in a corner the cherry-tree Queen Elizabeth is said to have planted over 400 years ago. A telephone call to the pub revealed that, yes, they have been told about it and someone has promised them a CD of the talks. So that’s all right. Norman Murphy The Bishop's Move, broadcast on Radio 4 on Friday, 6th February, 2004. The first of a series of four. We go back to the Anglers' Rest with pleasure and hear Mr Mulliner's tales with whatever twists a new Producer-Director (Ned Chaillet) imparts. Mr Mulliner himself seems to have forgotten his previous Augustine story, so much reminding does he need. There are pointless changes: a "will" becomes "shall", and one sentence begins "Thankfully" which lacks the authentic touch. Worst, the Bishop attributes "It is better to dwell in a corner of the housetop than with a brawling woman in a wide house" to Proverbs xi 9 instead of Proverbs xxi 9. If Wodehouse could get it right, why not the script-reader? But usually the actors play well, the incidental music is of the time, and their songs fit the plot. The printed version ends with Augustine receiving the vicarage of Steeple Mummery as a reward. It does not occur to anyone to ask how his new sweetheart (from the previous story) takes this promotion; perhaps they have forgotten about her. Wives follow husbands. In the broadcast Miss Postlethwaite turns feminist, surely against the rules of the Barmaids' Guild, and seems disappointed that, according to Mr Mulliner, Augustine's love accepts their new fate together. This should be an interesting series. John Fletcher Click here for a tribute to the Queen Mother From The
Spectator, 2 August 2003 An early morning phone call the other day alerted me to the news that my midday appointment in New Delhi had been ‘pre-poned’. Could I ‘do the needful’, the voice said, and ‘get my skates on’. A few months ago, I received an invitation from an Indian ministry. First they sent a fax giving me ‘advance intimation’ of the event, then two more faxes advising me of a ‘formal intimation’. After this, an invitation card arrived with the preamble: ‘Sir, we would like to confirm our intimation....’ Welcome to the wonderful world of Hinglish, a Hindu-inspired dialect that pulsates with energy, invention and humour – not all of it intended. Hinglish is full of cricket terminology and army metaphors, with echoes of P.G. Wodehouse and Dickens. It contains clunky puns and impeccably logical neologisms. In short, it is a delight. When, for instance, I receive routine requests for ‘intimation 48 hours in advance’ for flight or hotel bookings, I feel not irritated but grateful – my planning skills allow for little more. And when the young lady who runs my local restaurant smiles winningly and says, ‘We like to pander you’ (meaning, I assume, ‘pamper’) a mediocre lunch starts to taste that little bit better. Like so many good gags, ‘Official intimation’ pops up in P.G. Wodehouse (Heavy Weather, chapter ten), whose books are to be found on every bookshelf of every bookshop in India. It is a safe bet that Wodehouse is the inspiration for many standard Hinglish-isms, viz a ‘quantum’ (never a mere amount), ‘sans’ (as in, he went out ‘sans’ his coat), or, my favourite, ‘for the nonce’. An Indian acquaintance once playfully suggested that Wodehouse has a place in the elastic pantheon of Hindu gods. It was the late James Cameron who, in his Indian Summer, wrote of ‘the Indian gift of almost knowing what words mean’ – an affectionate way of describing the mishits but which fails to capture the inspired silliness of so many Hinglish-isms. A couple of years ago, during the match-fixing scandal that mesmerised the cricketing world, one newspaper described Kapil Dev, the former Indian captain, as ‘hooking Prabakhar on the front foot’, while another had him ‘ducking a googly’. As even the duffest cricketer would know, had the great man done the former he would very possibly have lost part of his head, while the latter would have had him flat on his belly. Any form of setback is routinely referred to by Indians as ‘tantamounting’ to ‘being on the back foot’. Similarly, one can only wonder what was going through the mind of the author of a letter to an editor that complained about the fact that 70 per cent of his countrymen lived in sanitary conditions where they had to ‘exhume in public’. ‘Our cultural mandarins have been clayfooting over recognition of leading architect Satish Gujral,’ admonished one of India’s arts arbitrageurs. Actually, it’s hard to imagine a more evocative description of the dynamism of the average Delhi babu or bureaucrat. Babu-isms themselves, however, can be irritating, and frequently jar with the mellifluous flow of Hinglish. One example for which I suspect babus are responsible is that anything which is pending – from the possible sale of a company to a forthcoming wedding – is said to be ‘on the anvil’; for example, ‘a change of guard is on the anvil in [that state of] Karnataka’. Hinglish makes good use of the sort of English slang that has not been heard in the streets of London for many decades. One governmental response to a recent weapons-procurement scandal (uncovered by journalists posing as arms-dealers, who managed to bribe 34 politicians and officials into helping advance the sale of a fictitious device lifted from the pages of Joseph Heller’s Catch 22) included the words ‘piffle and poppycock’, ‘balderdash’, ‘tomfoolery’, ‘humbug’ and, to dilute its authority yet more, ‘pure bilge’. In newspaper reports of crimes, ‘sleuths’ are perpetually ‘nabbing’ their man or, if not, they are usually ‘stumped’. It is always a bit startling to hear a police officer saying that he will get to the bottom of something ‘by hook or by crook’. I am also occasionally disconcerted to hear that people – as well as things or practices – have been ‘done away with’. More unappealing in tone is the ubiquity of ‘mishap’ to describe everything from massacres of peasants in rural India, the unspeakable daily carnage on India’s roads, to the 1992 razing of the 16th-century Babri mosque at Ayodhya by allies and members of the present Hindu revivalist government. Newspapers are also guilty of inappropriate levity: ‘A mosque in Tamil Nadu was bombed in the wee hours today.’ But the irrepressible lightness of Hinglish is, more often than not, a joy. India’s politicians preen themselves over newspaper and broadcast accounts of them ‘airdashing’ around the country, ‘chalking out’ plans, or, more usually, ‘felicitating’ each other. If I am in any way ‘belling the cat’ here, as Hinglish practitioners incessantly do, that is because so much in India is – as I am constantly reminded by my interlocutors – ‘humungous’. The country is so vast in its expanse, so limitless in its people, so deep in its history, and so, well, humungous in its problems that even the biggest disasters are seen in perspective. There was, one bright summer ago, a tense ceasefire just about holding in Kashmir, where Pakistan-backed and Islamist-influenced separatists are at war with the Indian army. An internal commander of the main insurgent group, Hizb ul-Mujahedin, turned up at a peace-strategy meeting in Saudi Arabia. But how did he get there, given that he had ‘infiltrated’ from Pakistani Kashmir into Indian Kashmir? Obvious, really. He was reported to have ‘exfiltrated’. ‘Isn’t it?’ Here's
a P.G. tip ALL P.G. WODEHOUSE fans owe Tony Ring a great debt of thanks, for the publication of A Prince for Hire marks the culmination of a remarkable piece of detective work. This novella gives a fascinating insight into the working methods and inspirations of Wodehouse. Ring has already compiled an eight-volume, 600,000-word concordance on Wodehouse's fiction as well as You Simply Hit Them With an Axe, an analysis of Wodehouse's extraordinary dealings with the taxman on both sides of the Atlantic. A Prince for Hire's only previous publication was in an obscure American magazine, The Illustrated Love Magazine, sold principally through FW Woolworth stores in the United States and Canada, as a five-part serial in 1931. Ring read the first two episodes and then began the frustrating search for the remaining three. Neither the Library of Congress nor the New York Public Library had any record of them and it was only after a two-year search and much Internet bidding that they were eventually tracked down and the five parts were once more united. The story of A Prince for Hire shows that Wodehouse was never afraid to plagiarise himself; he was a writer who was never happier than when working hard and never more miserable than when he needed a plot. A Prince for Hire has its origins some 20 years before with the serialisation in The Captain magazine of Psmith Journalist. Psmith, one of Wodehouse’s most enduring and endearing characters, takes over a New York magazine called Cosy Moments, a sleepy backwater of remarkable dullness, and reinvigorates it with racy, investigative journalism, encountering along the way some of New York's more unsavoury elements, including the finely drawn hood Bat Jarvis. In A Prince for Hire, Psmith has become Smith, the magazine has become Peaceful Moments, and here again is Bat Jarvis and his low-life cohorts. Psmith Journalist was published in book form in the UK in 1915. But here the story gets truly complicated, for Wodehouse planned to incorporate several elements of Psmith Journalist into a book for the US market called The Prince and Betty, but I will leave it to Ring in his excellent introduction to explain that book's tortured evolution. According to Ring, it seems that during one of the longueurs during his Hollywood scriptwriting career in about 1930, Wodehouse revisited the story and rewrote it from scratch, with A Prince for Hire being the result. With its references to the Wall Street crash and prohibition, it is evident that this is a new work, even though it utilises a well-trodden plot. That is the good news. The bad news for Wodehouse nuts is that this is a strictly limited edition of 1,000, 200 of which are hardbacks priced at £40, the remainder paperbacks at £14. So I suggest you get your skates on and bung off a cheque pronto to Galahad Books at 25 Cecil Court, London WC2N 4EZ to avoid disappointment. Click here to see news from the TWS Convention in Toronto 2003 Click here for a report on pig racing, 26 July 2003 Click here for a report of the Savage Club meeting on 8 July 2003 Click here for a report of the Sherlockian cricket match on 29 June 2003 Click here for a report on the cricket match with Dulwich Dusters on 20 June 2003 Click here for news about the September 2003 Wooster Sauce Blandings
Castle: Is it Apley? This question burst on the nation's broadsheets this morning. Pages 1-2 of The Times, p. 13 of the Daily Telegraph and the Guardian, p. 9 of the Independent. All arising from an address by Ian Greatbatch and Daryl Lloyd of University College London's Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, at the annual conference of the Royal Geographical Society and Institute of British Geographers. You can read an article summarising their address online at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3078912.stm. They are (it later appeared) members of the UK Society as well as geographers. Their site gives a link to ours. They must be excellent fellows. Up to a point, Lord Tilbury. The theory that Blandings is Apley is not even original by a long way. A much better case for it was made by Ann Wood in 1981, in a volume brought out to celebrate the centenary of Wodehouse's birth. The online correspondent of the BBC, Alex Kirby, attributes to Ian Greatbatch the remarkable view of Blandings Castle that "Bertie Wooster and his near-omniscient manservant Jeeves are frequent if ill-starred visitors". Perhaps they said that just to "sex it up". Perhaps that was Alex Kirby's unwise addition. But it is hardly compatible with the claim of Ian Greatbatch that "Our research involved six arduous months reading every one of Wodehouse's novels". Arduous? Someone has persuaded them too well that Wodehouse is the Shakespeare of our day, but duller. It would be a kindness to tap them on the shoulder half way through and say "these are funny". They might make the excuse, indeed they have done so, that when you are looking for geographical details you can't enjoy the plot. But then why did they get so many of the details, both of Blandings and of Apley Park, so wrong? Of Blandings: "Blandings must be at Apley Park in Hifnal". "Hifnal" is repeated three times in The Times. They probably mean Shifnal, because there is no town called "Hifnal" in Great Britain. Of both: "So when Wodehouse says the Wrekin is visible from the castle gardens, we picked out everywhere in Shropshire where you can see the Wrekin." But Wodehouse does not say it is visible from the castle gardens but from a first floor battlement. And as one who has visited Apley Park, I know you can't see the Wrekin from there at all, because when you look in that direction a lot of trees get in the way. The splendid photograph of Apley Park in the Daily Telegraph illustrates this rather well, providing you know better than a couple of geographers which direction to look in. I ask: What use is their GIS (Geographic Information Systems) or even their "viewshed analysis" (whatever that is; not a view of the Empress's sty certainly), if it doesn't take account of intervening trees? For the faithful, Norman Murphy has answered this question in his unrivalled "In Search of Blandings". Buy, borrow or beg a copy of this and search no more. But there always seem to be a few deviants who prefer to re-open the question and the answer they often give is Apley Park or Apley Hall. There is talk of a public debate on this subject; it is time the heretics were answered. Click here for a report of the Savage Club meeting on 11 February 2003 Click here for comments on PG Wodehouse: Lost in Exile Click here for a report on a recent visit to Dulwich and the Wodehouse exhibition at the College Click here for a report on the 2002 AGM Click here for a report from the 2002 annual dinner; and click here for a series of photographs to order The Mating Season The ten quarter-of-an-hour readings by Crawford Logan from The Mating Season have just finished. They were fascinating; yet I hardly laughed at all. Perhaps Wodehouse on radio isn't funny; but why not? When Jonathan Cecil does his unabridged readings on audio-cassette, you laugh. These were abridged; if you want to turn a 250-page novel into ten quarter-of-an-hour readings, a powerful abridging-knife is the first thing you reach for. I can't be sure because I didn't listen to all ten instalments, but I think they left out Bertie's entire visit to Wimbledon. This new audience will not know the plot of Mervyn Keene, Clubman. A lot of nifties were gouged out or squeezed up, losing their point. But Crawford Logan did us all a great service. He showed exactly where the most popular interpretations went wrong. I think it began when Ian Carmichael was Bertie and the suave Dennis Price was Jeeves. Dennis Price made his name in the film Kind Hearts and Coronets. There he was the heir to a Dukedom, who superbly bumped off any in the way, except one, and was then charged with the murder of the one he hadn't murdered. His voice and acting was more upper crust than Carmichael's. But as Jeeves and Bertie the two were applauded and the tradition was set, in which from then on to Fry and Laurie Jeeves is as much Eton and Oxford as Bertie. It may be easier to cast, and more popular to watch, but it cannot be faithful. In the first half of the twentieth century, the differences between idle aristocrats and their working-class servants covered manners, clothes, and above all accents. It is this that Crawford Logan reminds us of. Jeeves remains the outstanding brain and manipulator, but he is a domestic servant sent along by an agency. He is a valet and his uncle is a butler, and even the difference between those two in status (and probably salary) is reflected in their voices. Indeed all Crawford Logan's working-class voices, even Constable Dobbs, were carefully and faithfully crafted. Whether this will be available on cassette I don't know, but for this reason alone I hope so. John Fletcher Saturday December 21, 2002, Sue Arnold in The Guardian BBC Word For Word has brought out a neat new design, not much bigger than a box of Twinings Earl Grey teabags, which easily holds 12 cassettes and travels without fuss. Thank You, Jeeves (BBC, £19.99), P G Wodehouse's first full-length Jeeves-Wooster novel, is in this teabag format. Everyone has their favourite Jeeves voice - Michael Hordern, Stephen Fry, Simon Callow. I like Jonathan Cecil as much for the way he reads the Thank You, Jeeves author's preface, which says a lot about voices, as for the book itself. Instead of typing it, Wodehouse thought that for a change he would dictate it into one of those machines which records your observations on wax. He had second thoughts when he played it back and heard his own voice. "There was a kind of foggy dreariness about it that chilled the spirits. It stunned me. I'd been hoping if all went well to make Thank You, Jeeves an amusing book, gay if you see what I mean, rollicking if you still follow me, but with a voice like that, the thing would develop into one of those dim tragedies of peasant life which we return to the library after a quick glance at page one. I sold the machine next day and felt like the Ancient Mariner when he got rid of the albatross." The Queen's Birthday Honours Our President, Richard Briers: actor, services to drama: CBE Ian Carmichael: actor, services to drama: OBE Congratulations from the whole Society. Click one of the choices below Click here for a tribute to Peter Schwed Click here for a report, with pictures, of the cricket match against the Sherlockians on 14 July 2002 Click here for a report of the Savage Club meeting on 2 July 2002 Click here for a report on the cricket match with Dulwich Dusters on 21 June 2002 Click here for a review of The Land Where the Good Songs Go concert The Society's first meeting in Cambridge The 1999 Wodehouse Convention, Houston, Texas Clipboard (cuttings from various media) |