Amongst the characters created by P.G.Wodehouse through his many short stories of the 1920s and 1930s, none are more durable than Bertie Wooster, and Jeeves his valet (a Gentlemans Gentleman  not a Butler!). This is a reasonably engaging TV mini-series/comedy of selected excerpts of the literary pairs adventures, covering a very small range of their escapades that appeared in Wodehouses writings.

We have Bertie (played by Hugh Laurie), a financially well-endowed member of the upper crust who is more than a little lost in the real world, who relies on the wise and worldly Jeeves (Stephen Fry) to deliver him from his regular trials and tribulations. In view of the relatively small number of escapades covered in this entire first season of three 50-minute episodes, I will not elaborate to any great extent; except to say that say that Jeeves  a person of unbounded knowledge, foresight, commonsense and gentlemanly cunning  is the real hero of the show.

On a positive note, Stephen Fry is marvellous (if not a little over imposing at times) as Jeeves. He carries the persona of an oracle and devoted servant beautifully, with little use of physical tics to indicate his understanding of the situation at hand, or give away any of the tricks he has in store to combat the dilemmas in question. On the other hand, I found that Laurie used far too many sight gags and/or facial inflections to convince me that Bertie had a brain at all! Maybe it is Wodehouses writing style, the screenplay or direction; but all I saw in Wooster and his club member mates (with nicknames such as Barmy and Bingo) were characters drawn straight from the classic Monty Pythons Flying Circus Upper Class Twit of the Year sketch! Lauries portrayal of Bertie made me think more of a rich village idiot than a slightly eccentric individual. There are only a few other regular characters (notably Barmy and the Aunt from Hell). At least they were a little less over-the-top.

All that said, I still felt a little disappointed at the end of the series; thinking I hadnt got enough of this fix. Apparently there were three seasons (9 episodes in total) that may have fleshed out the characters better and represented a more satisfactory and value-for-money package.

THE EXTRAS

There is audio commentary/introduction feature that initially intimidated me (I expected to have to listen to 150 minutes of backslapping!), but it turned out quite the opposite!

There were a number of insights into P.G.Wodehouse that were quite interesting, including the evolution of the Wooster and Jeeves personas. However I found it quite annoying that this 15-minute featurette contained many scenes (and occasional commentary) not related to this first season at all, rather to seasons two and three  another reason to suggest that the package should have comprised the entire Jeeves and Wooster series instead of one season.

CONCLUSION

This is a reasonably engaging TV mini-series/comedy of selected excerpts of the literary pairs adventures, covering a very small range of the escapades that appeared in P.G.Wodehouses writings.