PG Wodehouse - Plum - Bookmark - BBC Documentary - 1989

it's Christmas with a special portrait of the prolific much-loved novelist PG Woodhouse PG Woodhouse is England's best loved humorous writer he died at Remsen burg Long Island in 1975 at the age of 93 the author of over a hundred books he was admired not only by readers the world over but also by his fellow writers evylyn War called him the head of my profession today what he did actually the thing you can never I think you can never write a simile in a comic novel without being aware that this has been done better and you you know in fact you better keep share of similes and it would have smaller skills I mean after you know she had said laughs like you know troop of cavalry galloping across a tin bridge I mean this sort of stuff I mean they you'll stop every time you can't do word like you I fade away I keep well away from although Woodhouse spent much of his working life in America he more than anyone made Englishness Universal but it's a carefully created England his legendary characters Jeeves Bertie Wooster and Lord Emsworth are the product of hours of hard solitary work but it wasn't the way he wanted to live he used to work in the morning go for walk in the afternoon and work again evening then at Nev knee had a cocktail and watch the soap opera that was his life and he never wanted to alter it well that means he spent two thirds of the waking day in which in the company of gym shoes and Bertie Wooster and that's where he belongs in the way tonight's bookmark looks at the life and work of his immensely dedicated writer and follows him through the war years as his timeless uniquely imagined world collided with reality in his crudest most uncompromising form in 1940 a few months before his 59th birthday Woodhouse was at the height of his literary career recently awarded an honorary Doctorate by Oxford University he was living as he had since the outbreak of the war at the French provincial town of La toque a reluctant to return to England because he would have had to leave his beloved dogs in quarantine Woodhouse and his wife put their trust in the French army and entertained British Airmen at their villa Lowood just outside la 2k he was not exactly shy but he was a loner and he loved people to be enjoying himself in his house exactly like she did but he would for instance when if we were dancing to the gramophone or chatting or eating or having a little drink he would suddenly put his head there it is through this door which which led to his oh yeah yes this door here and which was a little passage shown here which leads to the room where he used to do all his writing and his openness door and look round with his sweet smile and very short-sighted glasses and said everybody happy and we say yes thank you very much from the young man would say why don't you come and join the sir and he said no thank you very much but I think I'll go back to my work and you did threatened by the approach of an invading army they tried to get out but it was too late Woodhouse took refuge in his work and viewed the advancing Germans without relinquishing any of his very English irony young men setting out in life have often asked me how can I become an internee well there are several ways you can be a grocer in do I or a farm laborer a tamrac or a coal miner at Lille you can be one of the crew of a liner which has been sunk by enemy destroyers you can be a war grave gardener in the war cemeteries of France or like me you can settle down in a villa at la 2k and get stuck there until places occupied that is a simpler method as any you buy the villa and the Germans to the rest once reactions on finding oneself suddenly surrounded by the arm strength of a hostile power are rather interesting the first time you see a German soldier in your garden your impulse is to jump 10 feet straight up into the air and you do so but this feeling of embarrassment soon passes a week later you find yourself only jumping 5 feet and in the end familiarity so breeds indifference that you're able to sustain without a tremor the spectacle of men in steel helmets riding around your lawn on bicycles and even the discovery that two or three of them have dropped in and are taking a bath in your bathroom the motto of the German army in occupied territory is what's yours is mine and any nonsense about an Englishman's home being a castle is soon dispelled plumb had been to see the council about three days before the council said that's all right don't worry they won't get through the mare in no time and so on so plumb went back to his books and careful to her gardening or whatever it was and then next thing we knew Germans on motorcycles in their God and after a month or two all the British cities are citizens in @ok which included the billiard marker the golf pro a few barman and so on were rounded under 60 of war-making age were rounded up and taken off to civilian internment and that included no plumbers 58 we've for some reason were allowed to go home and put a few things together and as my home was three kilometers away and an early start desired I was actually sent there in a car it took a little of the edge off the uplifted mood caused by this luxury to discover on arriving that the soldier who was escorting me had expected me to be snappy my idea had been to have a cold shower and a change and then light pipe and sit down and muse for a while deciding in a calm and unhurried spirit what to take and what could be left behind his seem to be that five minutes was ample eventually we compromised on 10 I would like my biographers to make a careful note of the fact that the very first thought that occurred to me was that here was my first chance to buckle down and read the complete works of William Shakespeare reading the complete works of William Shakespeare was a thing had been meaning to do anytime these last 40 years but about three years previously I'd bought the Oxford Edition for that purpose but you know how it is I did not know what internment implied it might be four years or it might be a mere matter of weeks but the whole situation seemed to point to the complete works of Shakespeare so in they went no we didn't hear anything for quite a while except that we heard that he'd been interned that's all but you know we thought well interned is not imprisoned itself it's kept under restraint but that's all the eminent writer now surrounded by a hostile German army was born in 1881 Pelham Greville Woodhouse the thumb of Ernest Woodhouse a colonial magistrate in Hong Kong he was a judge in Hong Kong and my grandmother went out to visit her brother in Hong Kong on what they called the fishing fleet she went out fishing for her husband and she called him and in 1877 hmm is with Sanderson I've got a lovely picture of that's wedding over there yeah but I'm fishing for us to get out with me yes there was a standard technique the sooner they could get the manager says weren't enough men in England well it wasn't that they weren't enough women in Hong Kong except the other ones and they were taboo oh well they were on the side well they might talk about that his parents lived in Hong Kong and when the eldest brother who was by then about six was sent home they made a sort of wholesale job of it and sent the lot and plum at that time was only two and after that he never really had a her moon of any sort would has his mother Eleanor Dean the daughter of a west country vicar was the mother of four sons she just had the four boys perfil Philip no pepper ever offended John uh only Starman um Pelham Granville and Richards Lancelot Dean they had a fine assembly of name is she not told that yes they are fantastic names oh yes she was fantastic she was fantastic in in what way well she was a little bit of a martinet well she yes very straight but I mean it's really 714 letter one day she was of you very young girl this housemaid and she told you to go after game and bring it in on the Salva I could have hit her she's at 49 handle F and the poor Bill face went red I thought you hateful son and I never forgot that I felt so awful the fact that your parents were abroad so much of the time does that account for there being so few fathers and mothers in your books well I can't really we'll use a father and mothers and Menace it's rather unpleasant to know who the son doesn't get on with his father and rather but the amount is something you can make fun of ha oh the door these days but I'm behind you morning with dispenser grits would you care of some coffee madam oh thank you I don't really want an a Jeeves makes the worst coffee in London I sometimes think he must grind the beans with his heel I used a phrase in the book I write in which it said the springs of love of frozen by the rejection in childhood so that you have this person who is really not like other people and lives in an imaginative world of their own and the springs of love of frozen so they have very little communication paths of communication that's what plum was like the Woodhouse world is not however quite as simple as it it first appears if current Colonel Norman Murphy and author and retired Army officer is convinced that the locations of Woodhouse's novels are very firmly rooted in fact so convinced is he of his thesis that earlier this year he took a party of American tourists across Shropshire and Worcestershire in search of Woodhouse country we're going down to Handley castle and up to non-server I bleed ice when I say right and we're else I'm really not sure but all down run house triangle down there how do you like England miss Bennett Billie's I had lost its cheerful friendliness and a somewhat feline expression had taken its place pretty well she replied you don't like it well the way I look at it is this it's no use grumbling one's got to realize that in England one is in a savage country and one should simply be thankful one isn't eaten by the natives what makes you call England a savage country demanded Sam a staunch Patriot deeply stung well what else would you call a country where you can't get eyes central heating corn-on-the-cob or bathrooms mr. Collis you told me one something about the lawn outside there yeah inspectors forget laid down by PG wood has his father as a as a quickie Lord Oh sighs pokey Lord thank you yes obsessed about ya do what do you know anything else stuffy she was how scared can you tell us he lives here his PT Woodhouse's father was a judge in Hong Kong and he came here in night route and came here in 1900 and he was here for about six years with the with PG would house horses a there boy are they any of the furniture anything left from those days boys John he left at about 1906 I've been here for 52 years was Woodhouse in any sense an autobiographical writer the mystery surrounding the sources of his inspiration whether in early childhood or later at his public school is compounded by his public manner he defended his privacy by not in public anyway giving any clue as to what he really felt the three essentials for an autobiography are that its compiler shall have had an eccentric father and a miserable misunderstood childhood and had a hell of a time at his public school and I enjoyed none of these advantages my father was as normal as rice pudding my childhood went like a breeze from starts to finish with everyone I met understanding me perfectly well as to my school days at Dulwich they were just six years of unbroken bliss it would be laughable of me to attempt a formal autobiography I have not got the material what else loved it here in all these school stories they are set in the school of Dulwich but he moved the whole school in imagination appear to Shropshire so if you look at legend around here writin rotten Warfield peppery these are villages around here he gave those names schools the stories I think Dodge was the first place T felt was like home he was her for six years and he always described his six years of unbroken bliss I think no one does about public schools almost take that with a pinch of salt but I think a lot is due to aah Jill who was the headmaster then who plumb described as standing six foot six in his socks wearing a long white beard and scaring the pants off all of them but there's no doubt that he had to consider influence on plan we know certain with Chandler and Woodhouse and Chandra only missed one another by some holiday that they would go through a piece of work in that Inn he would get them to come back a few days later having translated into Greek and then he would translate they were translated in some other language and then back into the original and see how through their knowledge of the language structures how that would have changed from the original and parada yes good hoppy there what have we said that about the G Trevor was due at the Headmaster's private house at six o'clock on the present Tuesday he was looking forward to the ordeal not without apprehension the essays subject had been one man's meat is another man's poison and he had begun with while I cannot conscientiously go so far as to say that one man's meat is another man's poison yet I am certainly of the opinion that what is highly beneficial to one man may on the other hand to another man differently constituted be extremely deleterious and indeed absolutely fatal Trevor was not at all sure how the headmaster would take it either the omnia Harappa I ran both knew the plural normative 57 somewhere round about there I went over and saw him and we were talking about books and he asked me to send him a copy of Tony's his twelve Caesars which I did but it shows that he didn't only read who died he read Shakespeare all the time an urge me to read I remember he was quite disappointed when he discovered I couldn't read Greek which he apparently could speak well problem as well as English but with you he he didn't exactly reprove me for not having a completely classical education but is but but pointed out that I'd better do the best I jolly well could myself he was always reading his Shakespeare Woodhouse and his fellow internees were taken in a cattle truck across northern France to Liege prison and from there to the Citadel of a Hui in Belgium even in the middle of what must have been a frightening and mysterious journey Woodhouse the complete professional writer did not stop taking notes the citadel of we is one of those show places they charge you two francs to go into it's times of peace I believe it was actually built in the time as a Napoleonic Wars but its atmosphere is purely medieval it looks down on the river Murs from the summit of a mountain the sort of mountain some medieval sculptor would love to carve pictures on and it's one of those places where once you're in you're in its walls of fourteen feet thick and the corridors are lighted at bays in which are narrow slits of Windows August the third first night at we arrived 4:30 glad to be out of our cattle trucks but things don't look too good they put 40 of us in a room large enough for about 15 no beds not even straw on the floor I'm writing this at 8:30 half an hour before lights-out and it looks as if we should have to sit up all night our first night was not so bad as I thought it was going to be at the last moment we were moved into a larger room and somebody suddenly remembered that there was straw in the cellars so we went and fetched it a hundred and ten steps down and at the same up there was only enough to form a very thin deposit on the floor and it stank to heaven still it was straw no blankets tuff is the adjective I would use to describe the whole of these five weeks that we the first novelty of internment had worn off and we become acutely alive to the fact that we were in the soup and lighted to stay there for a considerable time the German soldiers themselves are alright being cooped up with them and in this small place you see a lot of them and they're always friendly they're all elderly reservists longing to get home to their wives and children with photographs they constantly show us and they sympathize with us one of them gave me his soup yesterday this new lot of Germans are simply baffled as to who on earth we are why Germany should think it worth it to round up on Corral a bunch of stab and old deadbeats like myself when the rest of us is beyond me to imagine the whole thing reminds me of a rather tough a version of the oath mic wandered out of the house and Acacia Grove a few steps took him to the railings that bounded the college grounds it was late August and the evenings had begun to close in the cricket field looked very cool and spacious in the dim light the school buildings looming vague and shadowy through the light missed the little gate by the railway bridge was not locked he went in and walked slowly across the turf towards the big clump of trees which marked the division between the cricket and the football fields it was all very pleasant and soothing after the pantomime Dame in her stuffy bed sitting-room he sat down on a bench beside the second eleven Telegraph board and looked across the ground of the pavilion for the first time that day he began to feel really homesick the clock on the tower of the senior block chimed quarter after quarter but Mike sat on thinking it was quite late when he got up and began to walk back to Acacia Grove he felt cold and stiff and very miserable he loved the school very dearly and you don't think that when you're scooped that there's something to be said for the argument when your school days are over they're over well they are but there always be with you particularly if they're happy and sometimes if they're not a fee would house remained obsessed with his old school for years after he'd left and as late as the 1930s with reviewing school cricket matches for the Dulwich College magazine Hammond did us proud he alone on the side played the right game he wasted no time but got going at once with a grand drive to the boundary bailey who'd been in a sort of coma for about an hour and 20 minutes got a fort leg as boarding school and then went University in Oxford and I think that was the one thing his life he was sad sad about that he hadn't got to Oxford army dude and his elder brother done say well now the double first and win the new legate he undoubted would've got a scholarship there but then in those days there wasn't state support and even though when he would have got help from scholarship his father panic lost of money speculating the rupee and he can't afford his n enough but he did this is fat ask ask you about yours when you were a boarder so he'd say oh very much so yes well his detail I think more so than anyone else I've discussed ones school life with and what sort of questions would he ask you about it oh just for the day-to-day light I was fascinated him the sort of team spirit in the house is it an anti going up to Cambridge father stammered Mike I'm afraid not Mike I'd manage it if I possibly could I'm just as anxious to see you get your blue as you are to get it but it's kinda to be quite frank I can't afford to send you to Cambridge I won't go into details which you wouldn't understand but I've lost a very large sum of money since I saw you last so large that we shall have to economize in every way I shall let this house and take a much smaller one and you and Bob I'm afraid we'll have to start earning your living I know it's a terrible disappointment to you old chap oh that's all right said Mike thickly it seemed to be something sticking in his throat preventing you from speaking if there was any possible way no no it's all right father rarely I don't mind a bit stokeley rough luck on you losing all that there was another silence the clock ticked away energetically on the mantelpiece thanks Mike said mr. Jackson as Mike started to leave the room in a sportsman I suppose it was like being a large public school populated by adults instead of children there was a camp captain that's right the the German was the camp commandant with all his Sandow shooters and second in command and then there was a camp captain and a deputy camp captain and floor wardens and room wardens of course he goes into all this in performing flee doesn't it and with some of them rather rather strict I'm wedded plumped and he was sort of senior boy he's a sixth form no no I think I think he made it perfectly clear that he didn't want to have any official position in the camp whatsoever but he was always treated just rather special some people do feel about what assets that he was part of a vanished species in Englishmen he was very much of the top class and he was didn't understand how ordinary people lived and work did he seem to you to be remote from the realities I would disagree completely with that he was friendly with everybody in the camp that you know if you read his books he has an insight into into how people of every class and certainly it was not until a few months ago when I read Norman Murphy's book that I read I realized he had the faintest connection with the aristocracy he never gave me that impression at all there were there were people in the camp who did but not plum plum was one of us there is a lively argument Claude Coburn's advance in the homage to Woodhouse book about political views of wood hazard for instance is Jeeves an agent of the ruling class or actually working secretly for the proletariat the old old misconception which seem possible now we've been so brainwashed by so-called socialist revolution if you like we forget that up to 1939 to have a job as a servant in the great house so the butler or housemaid or ballot was one the most n-ville jobs will get and prior to 1914 the butler was a cross between a gentleman and a roustabout because he wore stroke trousers a tail coat dress coat show exactly what he wore so is that the jacket that you would have once married you would ask that's right that's the kind of thing that we would have worn in silk Revere's and everything I mean half the evening in half morning I mean it was utterly ridiculous and he was some of them even wore the tail coat you know the full dress tail coat my acquaintance with Butler's and my all of them started at a very early age my parents were in Hong Kong most of the time and when I was in a Knickerbocker stage and during my school holidays I was passed from aunt to farmed a certain number of these aunts were the wives of clergymen which meant official calls at the local great house and when they paid these calls they took me along why I have never been able to understand for even at the age of 10 I was a social bust contributing little or nothing to the feast of reason and flow of soul beyond shuffling my feet and kicking the leg of the chair on which loving hands had dumped me there always came a moment when my hostess smiling one of those painful smiles suggested that it would be nice for your little nephew to go and have tea in the servants Hall and she was right I loved it my mind today is fragrant with memories of kindly footman and vivacious parlor maids in their society I forgot to be shy and kidded back and forth with the best of them good afternoon sir would you come in I'm so sorry sir Humphrey I do hope my Maddox maybe that was not so Humphrey waters are some itinerant circular all hope everything calories relish I hope you I think I should warn you no now look I think that I should warn you Jeeves sir Humphrey is a sort of janitor in a loony bin abdul-allah gist is the term I believe sir is it very possibly anyway Jeeves so Humphreys opinion of the eligible bachelors who have previously made a play for his daughter's hand is not much of a pile on that carpet I thought myself like the speedily convincing that Marian has not drawn another congenital idiot to her bosom but I wouldn't be alive jeez if you would bear in mind that he drinks know why strongly disapproves of smoking and his president of the West London branch of the antique gambling League he will sir it is not my commonplace air to smoke on duty or to discuss anti post prices of your guests a butler is a confident to his governor he's a friend to the family the boss will often discuss things of a most intimate nature with his Butler because he knows that a butler is the very epitome of tact and discretion when she's come from oh Jesus stock stock stock character you could take him back to the I'm told I don't speak Italian commedia dell'arte that there was all as a clever valid probably a bit of a crook he said to you in my when I was made to read Greek at school he came into the Greek to Aristophanes and so on there was the camera servant of the foolish young man geez oh geez how did you know I needed one of y'all hangover cures the clothing was you wearing last night sir covers a considerable area of the bedroom floor pretty heavy night Jesus still well worth it to get rid of those two young things did you respect a long time Jeeves yes I did Oh what time is it now it's just on one o'clock Oh splendid our Lord and useless will be leading on the rail of the diner taking a last glimpse of the dear old Hoagland and the dear old hill number love this moment be looking back at them and reading a style relief hey everybody it's the nut K nu T style which I think one can find in punch and elsewhere in the early years of the century before that I think in the 90s the vague young probably rather rich second third son of an aristocrat with a receding chin and butter colored hair either these are thumbs own sort of descriptions of the the nut what the link is they're not say well he had a lot of evasive slack nose any sister I'm not having a snifter for a shifter that could have been a nut I don't know when that started have a sniff to have a short one evasions always the number of ways of saying goodbye I think I've listed it somewhere that you say tube too you could say ticketed tom you could say you you had to wait - what - for - was about but it is there in one of his books there are about a dozen ways of saying Oh honk honk was on are there that this is where the mystery would house really begins father concern in this intensity private man extremely nice man who who invented everything Oh I mean invented a world it's a marvelous world it is an escapist world Universal I suppose that's why most people read Woodhouse so they they go into this extraordinary world it is and while it seems to be escapist we now know from Murphy that to some extent it existed to most of us casual observers given to snap judgments the lot of an old dwelling in marble halls with vassals and serfs at his side probably seems an enviable one a lucky stiff we say to ourselves as we drive off in our shadow bang after paying half a crown to be shown over the marble halls and in many cases of course we would be right but not in that of Clarence ninth Earl of Emsworth there was a snake in his Garden of Eden a crumpled leaf in his bed of roses a grain of sand in his spiritual spinach he had good health a large income and a first-class ancestral home with gravel soil rolling parkland and all the conveniences but these blessings were rendered null and void by the fact that the pure air of the district in which he lived was perverted by the presence of a man he was convinced and evil designs on that pre-eminent Pig Empress of Blandings when you Egypt and his novel they all start off on the terraces of Blandings castle here with charities rose gardens the balustrade looking out over the lake which features in every Daniel's novel 21 times altogether and of course down the section around the corner is the lawn where Galahad fee would always install this hammock under cedar tree where he will counsel and comfort to why battles or anxious young man or irate countess's let's go and have a look it would be easy to dismiss leftenant Colonel Norman Murphy as just another English eccentric in fact his book in search of Blandings has a breathtaking scholarly thoroughness Murphy has journeyed through record offices Somerset house and all the locations associated with Woodhouse in a quest to find the true models of his fictional world how he's sure this is the right place if you can get anywhere else in England within 8 miles where Woodhouse lived with fifteen of the factors should have out of 16 you know not doing badly every single thing he wrote about and Blandings castle in the estate except one is here every single factor there are no other places England with the lake the terraces the Greek temple the pond the kitchen garden the cottage in the wood laid out exactly as he describes them the fact is that Woodhouse it's fiction is often a brilliantly distilled version of his own experience one of his early novels for example Mike and Smith deals with the brief unhappy period of his life just after he left school to work in the city the city received Mike were the same aloofness with which the more western portion of London had welcomed him on the previous day nobody seemed to look at him he was permitted to alighted sand Paul's and make his way up Queen Victoria Street without any demonstration he followed the human stream till he reached the mansion house and eventually found himself at the massive building of the new Asiatic bank limited the difficulty now was how to make an effective entrance there was the bank and here was he how had he better set about breaking into the authorities that he'd positively arrived and was ready to start earning his for Palm temperament set his position would have been really a very lowly warm of Clark and he was one of very many clerks in those days the Hongkong and Shanghai bank in London when Woodhouse was with it 1800 to 1902 I think was really very much overstaffed with junior Clarke's they were in fact 48 junior clerks in the bank at that time most of them waiting for orders to go to the far east as it lasts though very much like school yes in fact people have often said that there was quite a public school atmosphere to the place and I opened the sledge on saw a gleaming front page and I thought well something ought to be done about this I wrote very common ascription of the opening of the new laser or the grand opening crowds and lumbered streets and me being presented at Buckingham Palace hands on and after I finished it I screaming funny I suddenly thought well I don't think the heavies apartment will think much of this so I decided to get a sharp knife and cut out the page and I cut this page out and all's well I looked in his look all right to me but the cashier had been feuding with the stationers him be trying for weeks to get something all the stationers and he rang up the station said do you call yourself station is sending a laser with an imperfect laser the front page missing they said no of course we didn't do that today says somebody musta cut through a page out because sheís onö nobody was such a embassy was cut the front page of a laser out and they said well you must have an embassy in the old apartment casual and he said why yes I was PG Woodhouse and I was I was put under the lights and grilled on I had to come clean but the story always ends when I tell it is that I got sex and became writer perfect nothing happened where I was forgiving on leaving the bank Woodhouse started out on his own as a writer and after completing a series of successful school stories in 1904 he set sail for America where he wrote musicals for Broadway and where in due course the world of showbiz provided him with a wife he liked soubrette I think this is where you all sort of gay young things from the chorus yes which is I suppose like the girl he married was her but she said to be but I think she's only in in the chorus when he met her she was married to rankle Rowley who died and she had Leah Norah and then he died and she had their money and I think she was in the course when plummeted but that's never been very well established and she was alive when I was doing research for the book it was fairly access this not come out I think and he met your grandmother in New York he met her in New York years what was she doing she was at she was out there honorable with a repertory company and she appeared on the stage and she said she was working on the stage to raise school fees to send my mother to school back here and Bromley which is what happened and they met up I think in this way that Plummer had a male friend who said to plum I'll bring my girl you bring yours have a night I've clumsy rosealee well I haven't got a girlfriend so his friend said well I'll bring my girlfriend's girlfriend and that was a for my grandmother and they met I think early in August and they were married late in September the same year it was a whirlwind romance on any of you anyway Ethel was a bit light in the memsaab all over again yes then the moon stopped being his mother yeah that's right uh perhaps only just a little more acid I think oh I just walked by yes she doesn't sound easy to live with no she would think impossible is it dear has it that I got the I got the awesome yes she was very vigorous she was at her best when she's a middle of a party um having fun and that to him was absolute an alpha and I often think that she doesn't get enough credit for what she did for him in this sense that she made his enormous sacrifice to keep people away from him because um she realized and realized fully that if some stranger was coming to lunch or coming to see them that would put him off his concentration and he'd worry certainly later years used to worry for two or three days before someone comes when it is going to say to them what should happen so forth and she protected him to a very considerable degree and gave him Sweden really took over the completely running their lives there is no doubt that Woodhouse's marriage was a harmonious love match and that his vivacious and forceful partner was his prop and stage at the end of his life one of the most significant things about the period of his internment is that she wasn't there to make certain crucial decisions for him on September the 8th exactly five weeks from the day of our arrival we were paraded and this time informed not that anyone had received a parcel but that we were to pack our belongings and proceed once more to an unknown destination on leaving we we had been given half a loaf of bread apiece and half a sausage and after we'd been 32 hours on the train we got another half loaf and some soup the journey that tossed took three days and three nights and it was rendered more trying than it needed then by the fact that we were not given the slightest clue as to how long it was going to last we just sat and sat and sat on the train rolled on and on it was rather like being on the ship of the Dead in outward bound it seemed to us quite possible that the engine-driver had been told just to keep on paying us about the countryside until headquarters had cleaned up a heavy lots of outstanding business on its desk and was at leisure to get around to deciding where it wanted us dumped the conviction to which who came on the second day was that he had lost his way and was too proud to make inquiries toast is no beauty spot it lies in the heart of the sugar beet country and if you're going in for growing sugar beets on a large scale you have to make up your mind to dispense with wild romantic scenery there is a flat dullness about the countryside which has led many a visitor to say if this is Upper Silesia what must Lower Silesia be like and the charm of any lunatic asylum never strikes you immediately you have to let it grow on you with the guards can't even say mr Wood arsenic I don't know the guards would have done but certainly they the Commandant knew who he was and the the Sandow Ferrer's they knew who he was and they'd read the books in translation I should imagine the Sandow Fury's nitrobacter rhythm in English because they spoke very good English but they were translations and and I mean he was apparently had a large gather a large following in Germany and the proposition though is that the Germans got their misunderstanding of England to some extent through reading Woodhouse and they thought that the the aristocracy that were represented by these drones Club idiots we're soft at least and could that they were important as people to be expected and then there was the story of Malcolm Muggeridge tells of the Germans having sent over a spy and dropped him by parachute either on purpose or by mistake on Dartmoor dressed in a top hat and spats thinking he'd get away with it he was immediately captured I'm not sure that's true but it's a good story the Germans may have thought they understood Woodhouse what they didn't understand was that his satire masks a profound affection for his subject whether talking about pigs or Butler's his comedy always comes out of a charitable bewilderment there was a man clapping to them is what copra is I think Michaels death death who went to interview a man and he asked him will he believe in an afterlife and plum said well some days I think I do and other days no I don't which is the only sane arts out of it he wasn't prepared to be categorical so Reid is looking for profanity will be disappointed disappointed would be mental to start feeding the animal Ronnie's face clouded he was vague as to what pigs ate but he knew that they needed a lot of whatever it was from his brief reading of Augustus Whipple on the care of the pig he seemed to remember it was important that the pig should not be allowed to skip meals it would be no use restoring to Lord Emsworth a skeleton Empress the cuisine must be maintained at its existing level or the thing might just as well be left undone for the first time he began to doubt the quality of his recent inspiration scanning the desk with knitted brows he took from the book rest of volume entitled pigs and how to make them pay a glance at page 61 and his misgivings were confirmed umm yes said Rani having skimmed through all the stuff about Bali meal and maize meal and linseed meal and potatoes and separated milk or buttermilk this he now so clearly was no one-man job where you going to take his to next probably the most famous spot in the entire state the pigsty of the immortal emphasis of lemmings who was a part ship a black Berkshire cell and of course won the prize this opera show three years running a feat unparalleled in porcine history and found this wing hero and lost older fees and lost the way through there to the bit I am physically lost you know some it's been fun I know so as a way round there somewhere there's a way around here somewhere can you see where it is can we walk down there again but please doing fine dust well this is the sky of the beloved Empress itself the emphasis Blandings specially installed here now because the other bedford realizes this is the real planning state in real life of course the Empress of Blandings was based on a cow a Jersey cow belonging to a friend of he would houses bizarre than satirize of indirectly he made her a pig instead she was black Berkshire style exactly this one is and whenever got em both with machine he could be found leaning negligently over the rails looking lovingly at his prized Pig just like this yeah I think somewhere I read that Woodhouse got the idea of the Earl of Emsworth because he'd read somewhere that a certain Duke or L had said his happiest moment in life had been looking at his prized Pig probably a that I did that but I think it is true because you yourself were a breeder of pigs if I was that I have to keep 50 pedigree breeding sows I'm about three or four pedigree balls and usually when they feral I was if I was around my dog's gums Watson help in fact I remember given the kiss of life to a piglet Lord Emsworth was obliged to fortify himself with another look at the Empress who was now at about her 54th of thousands calorie Galahad he said sinking his voice almost to a whisper the man who showed me the photograph of an enormous pig he thrust it under my nose with an evil earlier and said Emsworth old cocky wax meets the winner of this year's fat pig medal of the Frog for agricultural show his very words but what was the photograph oh don't you understand said Lord Emsworth this is a new Pig he imported it a day or two ago from a farm in kempt queen of matching him he calls it girl hand Lord Emsworth said his voice vibrating with emotion with this queen of matching him in the field Empress of Blandings we'll have to strain every nerve to repeat her triumphs of the last two years you don't mean it's fatter than the Empress the Royal is it the main event in England if you can get it even a card at the raw you're doing ever so well but they're all really a friendly lot and we laugh at each other if we lose isn't everything people I'm talking in the Woodhouse books about nobbling pigs stealing pigs and be quite a job to steal a baby yeah but they used to be a fool or tales years ago at the shows where they go along sometimes and put a drop of water in one pigs a year so anyway in the ring he kept shaking his head like where he had any little bits like that but I don't think anything has ever really been not too bad sorry she's having a drink now huh squeaking and you gonna feed it give it give us some apples we can't get this up to it you're coming up to furnaces and a lot of the fries that is one at home with final rule pray on them stand at marito and so they catch the judges eye and they'll stand nicely and turn around when you want it's a bit like ballet dancers real less and he can come and have a feel if they quarte and see if they're alright look at the mail see if it's all right and who a lot of work is doughnut er pigs are temperamental with them things have to be just so remove the custodian to whose society they have become accustomed and substitute a stranger and they refuse their meals and pine away incredible as it seems that a level-headed Pig could detect charm in his Pigman the owner knew that it was served a journalist who came to interview me at toast observed that it was no Blandings castle but its inmates were as much obsessed with nutrition as Lord emsworth's prize-winning Beast we were 1,300 internees with but a single thought a bevy of tapeworms could not have been more preoccupied with the matter of nourishment and the inmates of e log ate at the sight of it even if it was only barley soup our heart slept up as if we'd beheld a rainbow in the sky we sprang at the black pudding like wolves at a Russian peasant even a wind Janus sailor a man who having passed his formative years in the Society of weave early biscuits might have been supposed to be above the human weakness never failed to show visible emotion when the whistle blew for meals you may take it as a fact that no matter how apparently absorbed an internee maybe in some passing task or recreation his thoughts are rarely on his last or his next meal and when he talks he talks of little else even incarceration in a padded cell didn't stop Woodhouse working while he was at tossed he worked on a novel money in the bank and worked up his diary into a series of talks for his fellow internees can you tell me about the these talks that he wrote were they camp entertainments sort of eight o'clock on Friday everybody would that's the sort of thing yes okay you know talked to last presumably about 20 minutes and I went along to them and everybody else I wasn't so much concerned with it because they weren't I hadn't been a member of the the trek from hooey to wherever it was but the people who had there or fell about laughing it was most you know highly highly enjoyable it was these pieces that formed the basis of a series of talks would house broadcast to America over the German radio in the summer of 1941 coming up my experience as a jailbird I would say that the prison is all right for a video but I wouldn't live there who gave me the place on my part at any rate there was no money at the bar when I left loose I'm glad to go the last I saw of the old alma mater with the wall there closing the door of the van and standing back with the French equivalent of a right away he said au revoir to me which I thought a little tactless what about the the broad class themselves because those talks you mentioned that he gave in a camp were really the basis for those yes they were those Diamond now and now I read them since the only thing that has changed is that there are the two introductory paragraphs at the beginning of the first talk and there's the winding out paragraph at the end of the last talk otherwise they were the four talks which he wrote Oh in October I suppose of 1940 and delivered to a very appreciative audience that or their Saturday afternoon designing the United States was not at war with Germany and these broadcasts was simply made to reassure American fans who'd written to him at tossed that Woodhouse was alive and well but the broadcasts were picked up by the BBC monitoring service at cabochons and they were carefully orchestrated to cause a sensation the then Minister of Information Duff Cooper forced the BBC to allow a Daily Mirror journalist William Connor to broadcast a postscript to the nine o'clock news on July the 15th I have come to tell you tonight of the story of a rich man trying to make his last and greatest sale that of his own country it is a somber story of honor pawned to the Naz ease for the price of a soft bed in a luxury hotel it is the record of peih-gee Woodhouse ending 40 years of money-making fun with the worst joke he ever made in his life the only wise crack ever pulls that the world received in silence Connors broadcast as the BBC's lawyer pointed out was libelous ly inaccurate indeed the BBC later apologised for transmitting it all later evidence demonstrates there was no deal of any kind then a plaque the German Foreign Office official who set up the broadcasts emphatically denied that Woodhouse accepted release as the price for his harmless performance on radio he was approaching 60 the age at which he would have been released anyway but though the lawyer in charge of the mi5 investigation into the Woodhouse affair after the war cleared him of all but one or two minor technical offences the timing of the broadcast could not have been worse well my cause it made impossible for me to come to England was ice to have liked to do very much why did you feel it was impossible book well I mean it is see a v8 must feel so difficult and you can't go to a place where you're very unpopular you felt pretty bitter at the time yourself didn't you no never feel bitter about anything I just felt uncomfortable about it I was sorry that happened percent of all my friends stucked him everywhere didn't seem to make any difference to them but the climate of opinion about you changed pretty quickly after the war even before the end of the war didn't it I mean did you think don't you oh I thought it took some time I don't think I was very pleased with him did they broadcast from berlin-- and last war because although he didn't say anything the fact that he must have known everybody knew how hits the behave what a monster he was and how many fire if I or anybody else oh you I'm sure bridge said oh do you mind coming into the studio and making broadcast of the waters what would it turn round and said get lost and not that he was that he was that he English but I mean I I thought it was a terrible thing that as an American I almost wish to apologize because America was not in the war then but peih-gee Woodhouse had many many very loyal very close friends who were extremely worried about him and all they wanted to find out is where was plumb was he okay and there was American reporter that went over there and interviewed plumb however it was a garbled message that got back and all p.g Woodhouse wanted to do was show the usual British stiff upper lip hey that's a bad situation but I'm handling it just fine he did it in the way that he's written all his novels by making light of a situation instead of magnifying his worst he was unaware what was happening in England at the he was offered a chance to talk to the United States to his close personal friends in the United States and so he did it in five tape-recorded broadcasts these weren't done live he tape recorded these broadcasts or there was a speculation that he was given a report after each broadcast what was happening that's completely untrue he recorded in the United States forgetting that once Airways go out in one direction they could be heard in another direction if he had thought of that maybe he might not have done it but as an American I can always say I'm sorry he tried to reach us with his whereabouts he gave the broadcast they were quoted on wax and then it was all too late and data they put out on the English wavelength there's nothing he could do then to stop this and of course immediately he heard of the Ferrari that caused he remained silent the rest of the war yes he was also completely cut off from news information been in internment he had no access to he didn't when he was picked up by the Germans the situation was not that of dubsteps a very good point pre blitz has netted so well that it's the phony war almost absolutely yes yeah Thunderball as you may know in in some American military college after the war they actually used the transcripts of the broadcast as demonstrating how you could subtly write an tee an me an tee German propaganda and also all this talk in the newspapers about what else the traitors right yes I was going to a woman sewing classroom making things for the soldiers bedroom slippers and different things and this woman started this one big board well she said I tell you what I've done today she said I could hold of all what houses butchers and I've torn right and what I haven't told I've burnt this is it all asleep on me since you ain't armed unless so then I turned on her I said he happens to be my brother you know and I gave her what for and she stopped because he was a victim really wasn't he a kind of horrible thing that happens in war propaganda oh very much so yes didn't tell ships nice something yeah this rodent really didn't well it did it was terribly sad and I'm really very unfair but to be fair to the people who were being bombed in England they were living on their nerves it was ferocious war and anything that anybody did seem to do that was out of line you know talking to the enemy couldn't be allowed but sort of being put that way really sorry about food that gets destroyed by water or humor yes and by I'm careful people who are writing and broadcasting sometimes you know but they're luckily very much in the minority no I think if one is just done a foolish thing you've got to take the consequences just feel it's a pity it happened looking back on that now you feel that it was a foolish thing to done here VIN never occurred to me at the time but do you ever feel homesick for England yes I suppose I do occasionally what do you feel homesick for when you remember England what I think you miss football cricket a sound of crickets a phrase not the same sort of thing that used to be but of course I'd like to see the English countryside that's always rather luring any places in particular no actual town or village or anything but anywhere in Worcester sauce crop so anything like that I think it's a weird Dutch ever have another approach to the affair I think Woodhouse was crushed between the German propaganda and the English are you quality of a severe office of information you know the Americas one of the falls at the time so they took every measure to do a show them how nice and and honest the Germans would be so they have made him made this broadcast but in England well you had the danke cafe at the bombing said the English people were suffering and they needed a scapegoat so who has made a talk and he was made a scapegoat I think that's it anyone who can give pleasure to people and make them laugh for 70 years without malice or cruelty or sex a few great writer and I follow the words Queen Mother used last year when she unveiled attacked him in London she said all to a life after hard times and a hard day she went to bed amid Woodhouse push you into sleep with a smile on her face in making this film mom and I have the impression that we started out with a view of a secular Saint very much of the kind of man we you've been talking about but I still feel there's something that we haven't explained there is a mystery behind him that is not he's not quite as simple as he often appears this mystery is simply this acquired shy man who works so hard that every writer in Neyland said that is the best writer who got he worked so hard he didn't have time for if you like the social niceties he didn't of time for politics he was so busy working he just got on with it all he wanted to do was to write six days a week and go most drug matches on Saturday afternoon and because he was so simple people said the must be more mad that doesn't have to be when you think of yourself if you ever do and we know that you find joy which are very reluctant to do that or to talk about yourself but do you think of yourself as an Englishman still the most difficult to say yes I suppose I suppose they do you you

Channel: videocurios

Views: 99,392

Rating: 4.8512616 out of 5

Keywords: P. G. Wodehouse (Author), Jeeves And Wooster (Award-Winning Work), Jeeves (Film Character), Bertie Wooster (Book Character), blandings, richard gordon, Doctor In The House (TV Program), Doctor At Large (TV Program), Comedy-drama (TV Genre), Humour (TV Genre)

Id: DbiwROt0yL8

Length: 69min 46sec (4186 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 10 2014