by P.G. Wodehouse.
Starring Michael Hordern as Jeeves and Richard Briers as Bertie Wooster
with James Villiers as 'Stilton' Cheesewright and Liza Goddard as Lady Florence Craye

(Broadcast Mon at 6.30pm)

12.27pm What Ho! Jeeves - It's Wooster on the wireless! Richard Usborne toasts the survival of master and man
Have you ever met a Bertie Wooster, a rich young bachelor with a 'man'? Or a Jeeves, in service to one such? No?
Well, I haven't either, and I'm much older than you! Leisured luxury of that sort was commoner in Wodehouse's youth, at the turn of the century, than today. But Wodehouse was not of that class, leisure or income himself. He was a struggling writer of romantic stories, who found that he occasionally needed, as hero or buffoon, the rich, leisured young 'knut' or Burlington Bertie - just as he occasionally needed the poor young artist, the dyspeptic millionaire uncle, the beak-nosed, disapproving aunt, the 'topping' young girl or the arrogant aristocrat. Give the leisured young knut a servant, and you get dialogue... that stuff in short lines and inverted commas... people speaking interspersed with the author narrating. This 'plumming' of the cake was recommended to struggling writers by editors and publishers.
Wodehouse saw Bertie and Jeeves emerge thinly from his typewriter during the First World War. He found they had capabilities; he fleshed them out in short stories; he became fond of them; he laboured them to grow; built novels round them. And eventually he owned a couple as characterful, rigid, adaptable and popular as any since Holmes and Watson.

12.55 Weather; programme news (long wave only)