- published: 07 Sep 2013
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Jeeves and Wooster is a British comedy-drama series adapted by Clive Exton from P.G. Wodehouse's "Jeeves" stories. The series was a collaboration between Brian Eastman of Picture Partnership Productions and Granada Television.
It aired on the ITV network from 1990 to 1993, with the last series nominated for a British Academy Television Award for Best Drama Series. It starred Hugh Laurie as Bertie Wooster, a young gentleman with a "distinctive blend of airy nonchalance and refined gormlessness", and Stephen Fry as Jeeves, his improbably well-informed and talented valet. Wooster is a bachelor, a minor aristocrat and member of the idle rich. He and his friends, who are mainly members of The Drones Club, are extricated from all manner of societal misadventures by the indispensable valet ("gentleman's personal gentleman") Jeeves. The stories are set in the United Kingdom and the United States in the 1920s and 1930s.
When Fry and Laurie began the series they were already a popular double act (see Fry and Laurie) due to regular appearances on Channel 4's Friday Night Live and their own show A Bit of Fry & Laurie (BBC, 1987–95).
Reginald Jeeves is a fictional character in a series of humorous short stories and novels by P. G. Wodehouse (1881–1975), being the highly-competent valet of a wealthy and idle young Londoner named Bertie Wooster. Created in 1915, Jeeves continued to appear in Wodehouse's work until his last completed novel Aunts Aren't Gentlemen in 1974, a span of 59 years. The name "Jeeves" comes from Percy Jeeves (1888–1916), a Warwickshire cricketer killed in the First World War.
Both the name "Jeeves" and the character of Jeeves have come to be thought of as the quintessential name and nature of a valet or butler, inspiring many similar characters (as well as the name of the Internet search engine Ask Jeeves). A "Jeeves" is now a generic term in references such as the Oxford English Dictionary.
In a conversation with a policeman in "Jeeves and the Kid Clementina", Jeeves refers to himself as both a "gentleman's personal gentleman" and a "personal gentleman's gentleman." This means that Jeeves is a valet, not a butler—that is, he serves a man and not a household. However, Bertie Wooster has lent out Jeeves as a butler on several occasions, and notes: "If the call comes, he can buttle with the best of them."