Wodehouse Playhouse: Episodes, Cast & Source Stories

What is Wodehouse Playhouse?

Wodehouse Playhouse is an anthology, not another name for Jeeves and Wooster. Its regular run comprised twenty episodes across three series in 1975, 1976 and 1978, following a separate 1974 Comedy Playhouse pilot. David Climie adapted the stories. John Alderton appears throughout the twenty-episode run, while Pauline Collins joins him in the first two series. They play different characters from episode to episode.

That format makes this an unusually useful introduction to the breadth of Wodehouse. You can meet a Mulliner, visit a golf club or encounter one of the Drones without committing to a long sequence. The familiar performers do not signal that the same lovers have somehow forgotten last week’s engagement. Each story begins a new little social emergency with its own rules.

The cast: recurring performers, changing characters

Alderton and Collins are the central names to look for, but a conventional cast list can mislead here. They are not playing one fixed pair throughout. In “The Truth About George”, for example, they are George Mulliner and Susan Blake. The 1974 pilot belongs to a different cast, led by Julian Holloway as Archibald, Madeline Smith as Aurelia and William Mervyn as Mr Mulliner.

The table below identifies the principal performers and selected guest roles rather than claiming that all of these characters are present every week. Wodehouse himself supplies filmed introductions to the first series. Those introductions are a separate part of the programme’s appeal: the author introduces the dramatic entertainment, whereas the episode’s performers inhabit it.

How to choose a first episode and its book

Start with “The Truth About George” if you want to discover the Mulliner stories. Then read the original in Meet Mr Mulliner, following the storyteller’s own presentation of George’s difficulties. “Mulliner’s Buck-U-Uppo”, also in that collection, gives you a second comparison without buying another book. A collection is often better value for this kind of exploration than an edition chosen solely because its cover mentions television.

For golf, try “Rodney Fails to Qualify”, which belongs to The Heart of a Goof. The later “Feet of Clay” and “Tangled Hearts” lead to Nothing Serious. You do not need to know golf’s entire rule book to follow romantic embarrassment, misplaced confidence or competition between people who should be enjoying themselves. Let the characters’ disproportionate seriousness supply the joke.

If the Hollywood stories catch your attention, turn to Blandings Castle and Elsewhere. Despite the castle on the cover, its contents also include “The Rise of Minna Nordstrom”, “The Nodder” and “Monkey Business”. The television episode called “The Nodder” combines the last two stories. This is a particularly useful reminder to compare contents lists rather than assume every episode has exactly one textual source.

Watching an anthology as an adaptation

A productive comparison begins with the narrative frame. Who is telling the story in the book, and what does that narrator know? Then look at the practical demands of television: an actor has to perform an embarrassment that prose may describe at a distance, and a scene needs a place, a duration and a visible outcome. Neither medium has to reproduce the other’s timing exactly to make the situation intelligible.

The episode list is a reading route, not a substitute for the collections. Try reading one original immediately after the screen version, then another before watching. Reversing the order helps you notice whether the pleasure lies in recognising an incident or discovering how it is narrated. It also avoids judging a whole collection by the one story selected for television.

Episode dates and the pilot

The regular series dates below are cross-checked against episode listings. Three dates late in series two remain disputed between British Comedy Guide and Wikipedia/IMDb-derived listings, so both alternatives are shown instead of silently selecting one. BBC Genome records could not be retrieved during this check. The pilot is identified by year here because available listings also disagree on its precise day and month. These uncertainties concern broadcast metadata, not the identity of the adapted stories.