When it comes to comedy doubles, Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie are one of the best. Their work in 'Blackadder' and their own sketch show 'A Bit of Fry and Laurie' is brilliant, so their combination on 'Jeeves and Wooster' makes this more subtle comedy surprisingly funny.'Jeeves and Wooster' - based on the P.D. Wodehouse stories - is more a comedy of manners and a subtle class satire than a laugh-track supported sitcom we're normally spoonfed with, which makes it even more interesting. Laurie plays Bertie Wooster, a well-meaning, but ultimately dim man of society (who doesn't really seem to do anything of notice) and is more interested in fooling around with friends and defying his meddling Aunt Agatha. Fry plays his valet Reginald Jeeves, a man with reserved manners, address and decorum who has an at-times acid tongue and always seems to save Wooster and fix his many mistakes. In a way, Wooster is similar to Laurie's Prince George in 'Blackadder the Third'. While George's stupidity was more obvious, and used as a deliberate comic tool, Wooster is more of a well-meaning buffoon, who wants to do the right thing but has an inflated view of his own intelligence, while still remaining endearing. Stephen Fry's Jeeves is the star of the show. His quick wit and subtle sarcasm provide the majority of the laughs and his calm demeanour reflects the conservative setting.While the main plots revolve around Jeeves cleaning up Wooster's latest disaster, the hour-long duration gives you time to get to know the characters, which is important for a relatively "gentler" comedy.If you're a fan of Fry and Laurie, then check out 'Jeeves and Wooster', you won't regret it.

I missed this series in its many TV outings and have only just caught up with it on DVD. Knowing how much Fry and Laurie love Wodehouse, I was hoping for good things. Overall, I am slightly disappointed with it, but it is still enjoyable and I wouldn't want to discourage anybody from giving it a view.Stephen Fry was born to play Jeeves, but Hugh Laurie's Wooster is too broad for my taste. His mugging and 'silly ass' mannerisms are overdone, particularly in the first two seasons. However, he does tone them down after that and the shows benefit as a result.Surprisingly, this appears to be only the second attempt to televise what is undoubtedly one of the great literary double-acts of the Twentieth Century. There was a series in the 60s, with Dennis Price and Ian Carmichael, but Wodehouse was scathing about Carmichael's 'middle-aged travesty' of Wooster, so it probably wasn't much good.There may be a reason for this relative neglect. Good books don't always make good dramas and I think Wodehouse gave the screenwriter (Clive Exton) a couple of problems which he never entirely solved.Firstly, the material doesn't really fit the fifty-minute format. The short stories are slightly too short and the novels are far too long.Exton's approach to the short stories is to intertwine two (or more) into a single episode. This is usually done quite adroitly, but often the individual stories lose crucial scenes and fail to build up their full comic momentum. In most cases, I think it would have been better to stretch single stories to the required length rather than to condense them in this way.With the novels he took three different approaches. Some he pared down to the bare bones, retaining the central story elements but stripping away all the sub-plots. In others, he pulls the different sub-plots apart and reassembles them as two separate, consecutive, stories. Neither approach really works. Wodehouse took great care with his plot construction. Much of the humour in the novels is in the way that incident piles on incident, so that poor old Wooster's life becomes 'one damn thing after another'.Only once does Exton simply break the novel in half and present it as a two-part story. Even here, he has to simplify too much (there is probably enough material for three episodes).The second problem is more fundamental and may be insoluble. While the incidents and the characters are funny in themselves, the genius of the books lies in Bertie Wooster's unique narrative voice, with its evocative slang and its elaborate hyperbole. The books are not just about what happens, but how Wooster perceives and relates it. He turns 'making mountains out of molehills' into high art.It is the same with characters. No actual Aunt Agatha can possibly be the intimidating old dragon of Wooster's imagination. This is even more true of the wonderful Madeleine Basset. She can be depicted accurately and amusingly (Elizabeth Morton has a good stab at it) but no performance can hope to be as droll as Bertie's designation of her: "a droopy, soupy, sentimental article."Of course, Exton could have given Wooster a voice-over, but there would be a danger of making the shows too wordy. As it is, he obviously felt that some of the stories were a bit short on physical action. To strengthen them visually, he makes radical changes to the plots and adds scenes and bits of physical comedy that have no counterpart in the books. Sometimes these amendments work well and the slapstick elements integrate seamlessly into the general tone of the stories, but on other occasions he is less successful. There are a couple of truly terrible ideas that Fry and Laurie should simply have refused to sanction. In particular, putting Wooster in drag was deplorable enough, but Jeeves in drag was unforgivable: shame on you, Mr Exton.The great Jeeves and Wooster series has yet to be made. However, if P G Wodehouse is to your taste, then this series has more hits than misses.Only the most uncompromising Wodehouse purists will fail to get enjoyment out of it.PS: If any actor wants to know how to play Bertie Wooster he should check out the audio books read by Jonathan Cecil. He is spot on.

This show is full of surprises and so much fun to watch. Brightens a bad mood every time. I had to go out and get a book and it's just as good. These actors are the very best to play Wooster and Jeeves. Jeeves seems to have been engaged to every girl that he has ever met. Jeeves has cousins all over the place that keep coming up in conversation. You would think that Jeeves would have been the millionaire and Wooster would be the butler. You know throughout the episodes that Jeeves is the one with the brains. Wooster lacks reasonable thinking and depends on Jeeves to think for him and help him out in every situation he gets himself into. This show gives me a warm innocent feeling of days gone past. The language, and the scenery alone is worth watching Wooster and Jeeves for. Jacqueline

I agree the cast changes, and definitely the loss of the original Aunt Agatha, affect reaction to the series as a whole, but not necessarily individual episodes or seasons. To see characters switch from one role to another unrelated role was a bit disconcerting. The series 3/4 Gussie was a bookie in series 1; the original Marilyn Bassett becomes Florence Cray in 3/4. It was a monumental task, however, to put all 50 stories into one shorter body of work and this does the job well. I agree somewhat, about the accents: Janan Kubba's New York accent was delightful if odd. The mistake in most Brit productions is they don't hear a difference between Americans and Canadians. Some actors were Canadians and hence (apparently) sounded American to the BBC. I can tell the difference between a Northern dialect, Londoner and Welshman but was stunned tonight (for instance) watching a BBC production ("Carrie's War"), in which an "American airman" was identified as being from Pennsylvania (where I live) and having a southern drawl. Maybe we are picky; maybe we are more conscious because we watch more Britcoms than the average American. And maybe the majority of Englishman wouldn't notice that "aboot" is not something you'd hear south of the Canadian border. These are minor. The later episodes ARE more ridiculous and goofy, but I watch them on a regular basis. Laughter is precious; this is a clean, non-demeaning, and very pleasant escape that even the young members of the household can enjoy. How rare is that?