How to be Bourgeois, and other matters
More baffling is the admiration for Mr Fry's supposed comic skills. For anyone who actually appreciates P. G. Wodehouse, Mr Fry's version of Jeeves and Wooster was so creakily wooden and blatant as to be almost physically painful. It is not impossible to portray this pair on TV - as I have pointed out before, Dennis Price and Ian Carmichael did so brilliantly, with much subtlety, in the early 1960s, and were actually lauded by Wodehouse himself - who must be the ultimate judge.
But it is difficult, and it requires the actors involved to realise that Wodehouse's genius lies in his descriptions. You can't actually put lines such as 'Ice began to form on the butler's upper slopes' into dialogue. But you can, having read it, know immediately and exactly what it means, and if you have the sympathy and the talent, you can presumably convey it on screen.
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