Part of Series
EPISODE 2 IN A MAJOR BBC DRAMA STARRING TIMOTHY SPALL, DAVID WALLIAMS AND JENNIFER SAUNDERS An American family come to stay at Blandings, but Freddie's attempts to sell them dog-food causes major embarrassment. Connie is desperate to make a good impression on her visiting old school nemesis, Veronica, and her rich American husband, Mr Schoonmaker. She enlists the services of snobbish secretary Mr Baxter to tidy up Blandings, in particular Clarence, who is liberally spreading manure on his roses and causing a stink. Meanwhile, Freddie has fallen madly in love with dog-lover Pandora and attempts to impress her by becoming a dog-food salesman, much to his Aunt Connie's embarrassment. 'Sublime comic genius' Ben Elton 'You don't analyse such sunlit perfection, you just bask in its warmth and splendour.' Stephen Fry 'The funniest writer ever to put words to paper.' Hugh Laurie 'P.G. Wodehouse remains the greatest chronicler of a certain kind of Englishness, that no one else has ever captured quite so sharply, or with quite as much wit and affection.' Julian Fellowes
Author
Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, KBE, was a comic writer who enjoyed enormous popular success during a career of more than seventy years and continues to be widely read over 40 years after his death. Despite the political and social upheavals that occurred during his life, much of which was spent in France and the United States, Wodehouse's main canvas remained that of prewar English upper-class society, reflecting his birth, education, and youthful writing career. An acknowledged master of English prose, Wodehouse has been admired both by contemporaries such as Hilaire Belloc, Evelyn Waugh and Rudyard Kipling and by more recent writers such as Douglas Adams, Salman Rushdie and Terry Pratchett. Sean O'Casey famously called him "English literature's performing flea", a description that Wodehouse used as the title of a collection of his letters to a friend, Bill Townend. Best known today for the Jeeves and Blandings Castle novels and short stories, Wodehouse was also a talented playwright and lyricist who was part author and writer of fifteen plays and of 250 lyrics for some thirty musical comedies. He worked with Cole Porter on the musical Anything Goes (1934) and frequently collaborated with Jerome Kern and Guy Bolton. He wrote the lyrics for the hit song Bill in Kern's Show Boat (1927), wrote the lyrics for the Gershwin/Romberg musical Rosalie (1928), and collaborated with Rudolf Friml on a musical version of The Three Musketeers (1928).
