World of Wooster, The

1 9 6 5 – 1 9 6 7 (UK)
20 x 30 minute episodes

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