A gentle comedy series adapted for television by Richard Waring and Michael Mills from the stories by Pelham Grenville Wodehouse (1881-1975).
Ian Carmichael played the title role as Bertie Wooster – an incompetent aristocrat of the 1920s, totally dependent on his snobbish and supercilious manservant Jeeves (Dennis Price) whose incalculably superior intellect was constantly needed in order to extricate his master from his latest scrape.
Derek Nimmo also appeared in the later shows as ‘silly-arse’ Bingo Little.
Wodehouse himself was apparently less than impressed with Ian Carmichael’s performance (in his mid-to-late forties, Carmichael was at least a decade too old to make a truly convincing Bertie), and although he was much more positive about Dennis Price’s suavely avuncular Jeeves, he remained firmly convinced that the characters’ rightful place was between the pages of a book.
25 years later, Wodehouse’s stories would be adapted by Granada Television as Jeeves and Wooster with Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie benefiting both from much more lavish production values and, crucially, from Clive Exton’s far more nuanced scripts.
Sadly The World Of Wooster no longer exists – Like so many other classic television programmes, all but two of the episodes were erased in the early 1970s.
Bertie Wooster
Ian Carmichael Jeeves
Dennis Price Bingo Little
Derek Nimmo Claude
Timothy Carlton Eustace
Simon Ward Tuppy Glossop
Edwin Apps Sir Humphrey Wardour
Clive Morton Aunt Agatha
Fabia Drake Aunt Dahlia
Eleanor Summerfield Rev. ‘Beefy’ Bingham
Peter Jesson
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