A funny coincidence... and a class act that created TV’s best Bertie Wooster

Ian Carmichael’s celebrated interpretation of PG Wodehouse’s character Bertie Wooster, the misadventuring, 1920s upper class loafer who was regularly extricated from trouble by his cool manservant Jeeves, was the coincidental creation of like minds.

During 1964, Ian had been discussing with his former agent Richard Stone potential projects, and the most promising idea had been a TV series based around Wodehouse’s definitive “silly ass”.

“Suddenly there was a dearth of good film scripts,” Ian recalled. “I thought of the Jeeves stories and was once on the point of sending them to the BBC and suggesting a series, when I thought they might seem passe. I also felt that I might be passe too, having to go back to the 20s for material.”

The actor also worried that he might become even more “typecast as a featherbrained character,” if such a thing was possible. The idea was dropped.

However, in a meeting with Michael Mills, a light entertainment producer for the BBC, Ian was astonished to hear his friend was planning a series based on the Jeeves and Wooster short stories, and had been looking into the idea since 1963. By November 1964 the BBC had optioned the adaptation rights. At the time, and despite the failure of the feature film Hide and Seek, Ian’s ambition was to become a romantic leading man which, he somewhat ruefully commented, was “hard to achieve when people expect you to be funny all the time.” However, Mills’ enthusiasm for Ian to take on the mantle of Wooster “sort of relieved me of my responsibility for the decision. Although it’s a silly-ass part it’s such a classic one that my inhibitions about playing a clot again just vanished.”

Even though he had been won over, Ian was still committed to the Broadway run of Boeing-Boeing. Generously, the producer offered to keep the casting open as the production team for The World of Wooster wouldn’t be in a position to start work until early in 1965. By February, the fate of the play was clear and Ian immediately wrote to his loyal BBC colleague: “Boeing-Boeing has failed on Broadway – we come off next Saturday night, [and] I shall be returning home next week. There are one or two offers waiting for me, but I am not at all sure of [them] until I get home. I wondered if you were in a position to get cracking on that Woodhouse (sic) pilot fairly soon.”

Ian returned to England on February 22 eager to don the spats, monocle and Oxford bags of a literary icon. The ensuing work to get The World of Wooster before the cameras was typical of a more innocent television age when, incredibly, it was possible to get a six-part comedy series ready for transmission from a standing start in just over three months. Right from the start, he was an integral part of the three-man creative team, alongside Mills and writer Richard Waring. A sign of the high regard in which the producer held his leading actor was that, once written, the screenplays would be sent to Ian to comment on, and many of his suggestions would be included in the final drafts.

With his position as a keystone of Wooster’s production office it’s no wonder that Ian’s fee was confirmed at, for 1965, an incredibly generous 500 guineas per half-hour episode – a staggering £6,400 in today’s coinage – plus an additional £87.10s per programme, “for the filming sessions and the artist’s work in revising and adapting the scripts.”

At a time when many former film actors were establishing themselves as TV regulars, Ian’s high fee, also reflective of his former standing as a leading man in British movies, set a very helpful precedent within the acting profession. During the auditions for Jeeves, Ian had developed the quavering, stuttering speech patterns that implied Bertie was in a constant state of nervous anxiety – which he had based on an officer he had served with during the final years of the war – and once Dennis Price had been cast as Jeeves, Ian was overjoyed with the patience and dedication his co-star showed in rehearsals.

Ian found it difficult learning lines, a problem that grew more pronounced the older he became, and the challenge was compounded by the Wooster scripts, in which both he and Dennis were required to give long speeches. With very few edits per episode, the stories were recorded “as live,” adding to the pressure on the actors. With both men in accord on the need for constant rehearsal, Ian recalled, “we both had an understanding of each other’s problems and shortcomings which made for harmony and compatibility.”

There was no competition between them and Dennis was always the first to acknowledge who was the star of the show. “I had a totally happy relationship with Dennis,” Ian recalled. “A lot of two-handed stuff went on with him, and when I was talking to Michael Mills, the director, he’d go and sit down. I’d say, ‘Come over here Dennis, because you’re in this scene too’. He’d reply, ‘No, no. You arrange it, then tell me what I’ve got to do.”

The sight of Ian dressed in period 1920s clothes – walking along with a silver-topped cane, driving a soft-topped Bentley (at the same time as his old chum Patrick Macnee was driving a soft-topped Bentley in The Avengers), playing golf and opening a bottle of champagne while Jeeves calmly took a phone call, against a jaunty, tinkling melody – greeted curious viewers as they watched the title sequence of the first episode of The World of Wooster. “Jeeves and the Dog Mackintosh” aired on Sunday, May 30. The phrase “overnight success” is much misused, but the series really was an instant critical and popular hit.

The biggest accolade paid to the Wooster production team came shortly after the first series ended. A note from Remsenburg, Long Island was short and to the point:

“To the producer and cast of the Jeeves sketches.

Thank you all for the perfectly wonderful performances. I am simply delighted with it. Bertie and Jeeves are just as I have always imagined them, and every part is played just right.

Bless you!

PG Wodehouse.”

The success of The World of Wooster was particularly significant for Ian. With a shortage of any good film or television film scripts in the two years before it went into production, he had felt that his career had been in the professional doldrums. Wooster not only made him a nationally recognised figure all over again but also transformed him into a BBC star, a situation he was able to build on productively in the late 1960s and into the 1970s. Ian’s identification with Bertie, and the 1920s in particular, would however stay with him, an early sign being that after the TV series, Wodehouse tried to interest Ian in a stage musical version starring him as Wooster, but he turned it down because “he had always been too old for Bertie and did not want to press his luck any longer.”

For Michael Mills, though, his friend’s three-year turn as Wodehouse’s affable buffoon would be career-defining: “Bertie Wooster was the best thing he ever did. He is, in appearance, always slightly comic. The clown always wants to play Hamlet – but he was tremendous.

“A lot of people had tried Bertie Wooster before, including [David] Niven, who couldn’t do it; but Ian’s technique, his control, his straight-down-the-middle performance, were perfect.”

Ian Carmichael: This Charming Man by Robert Fairclough is published by Aurum priced £20. To order from the Yorkshire Post Bookshop call 0800 0153232 or online at www.yorkshirepostbookshop.co.uk.