Latest news with #Wodehouse
The Herald Scotland
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
Step into the witty world of PG Wodehouse
'Yes, he's got a great story,' says Daws, one of the most familiar faces on television, who has appeared in the likes of Jeeves and Wooster, John Sullivan's Roger Roger. Essex-born Daws became interested in PG 'Plum' Wodehouse (as a child, Wodehouse couldn't pronounce his first name, Pelham, and early attempts sounded like 'Plum,') when at RADA. 'I was given a copy of Right Ho, Jeeves by actor/writer Tom Wilkinson, who was directing at the Academy. I read it and loved it, little knowing that a few years later I'd be starring in a wonderful TV adaptation.' Daws became fascinated with Wodehouse, reading several biographies of the writer. 'I learned about his extraordinary life, including his early career as a Broadway lyricist, which I'd known nothing about. I then called my friend Bill Humble and said, 'Do you think there might be a play about this?'. Incredibly, he told me that he'd just finished working on a screenplay about his life, which wasn't being picked up.' He smiles. 'The screenplay didn't make it, but the play has.' The actor adds; 'I was invited up to do the piece at the Assembly two years ago but couldn't because I was filming. Then Bill died just before Christmas. But I called our producer and suggested we do it this year.' The Wodehouse theatre project is clearly a labour of love. 'I was fascinated to learn that Wodehouse was a man who lived in a little bubble. So few people actually knew what he looked or sounded like. And I had no idea that before he'd become a successful writer, he'd been a contributor of stories to magazines, but then made his fortune in America as a lyricist for the likes of Cole Porter. At one point he had five shows running on Broadway simultaneously, and even if he'd never writer a Jeeves and Wooster, he'd have become famous for helping to create the great American musical, using the American vernacular, which hadn't been done before.' What sort of man was Wodehouse? 'He was guarded and considered quite shy and naïve. He was in some ways a repressed Victorian, separated from his parents for most of his childhood. (His father was a Colonial Civil Servant. Plum was dumped on a nanny from the ages of two to 15 while they worked in Hong Kong). He really did exist in the world he conjured up and was never really happy in the world outside of it. The one time in his world he was forced out of it, it didn't go well at all.' Daws is referring to Wodehouse's connection with Nazi Germany. Living in France when war broke out, he was playing in a cricket match on the June day in 1941 when taken prisoner and sent to an internment camp in Upper Silesia. The Germans manipulated him into making what became known as the 'Berlin broadcast', which was used by the Nazis for propaganda purposes. He wrote a diary of this period entitled Wodehouse in Wonderland. Wodehouse described the period as his 'great shaming.' MI6 later exonerated the writer. 'To be honest, some people are still divided (about Wodehouse's complicity) but I think there is no shadow of a doubt that he was innocent. But stupid? Yes. Interestingly (and sadly) the British government didn't release the report of his innocence until after his death.' Wodehouse was a workaholic, describing himself as 'a writing machine'. 'This was when he was happiest,' says Daws. Was Wodehouse living the life in his head of the sort he couldn't manage for real? 'I didn't think of that, but I think it's spot on. It's often true of writers generally, such as Dickens, but I think it's especially true of Wodehouse.' Daws adds; 'And Plum didn't write about a world which existed. It was historic, but it had a lightness to it, about toffs and rich people and the so-called Roaring Twenties. Yet he's still respected as one the greatest comic writers ever. And he was entirely dedicated to his craft.' The actor laughs. 'He knew that comedy is a very serious business.' The play is set in the 1950s where we see Wodehouse is in his New York state home, writing another Jeeves and Wooster book. We hear Wodehouse's wife Ethel ('Bunny') occasionally ask for a drink as an off-stage voice, while he writes letters to his beloved daughter 'Snorkles' (his affectionate name for Leonora). He is also pursued by a biographer, whom we don't see, keen to write his story. And Wodehouse occasionally breaks into the songs he has co-written. Read more Daws loves the challenge, but he's eminently qualified to entertain an audience, leaping across characters including Bertie Wooster, Jeeves, Lord Emsworth, Gussie Fink-Nottle and the squashily romantic Madeline Bassett. He has long been a natural performer. Born with feet and leg problems, the actor spent the first five years of his life in and out of hospital. 'I didn't walk until I was five, but I was precocious little brat and cast into the women's ward I sang songs like How Much Is That Doggie in The Window.' He grins. 'I blame my early age handicap for introducing me to the joys of comedy. And then at my ordinary secondary school, I was lucky to have a great drama department. But there were showbiz genes in the family tree, such as grandmother who appeared in Marie Lloyd musicals in the West End and played the Fairy Godmother at Drury Lane.' Robert Daws' talent shone through, accepted into RADA aged just 17, he went on to join the Royal Lyceum Company in Edinburgh and work in acclaimed TV productions such as the award-winning Outside Edge by Richard Harris. He smiles as he rewinds, 'I think I'm so lucky to have worked in rep theatre. You really get the chance to find out what you are good at and hearing the gears crunch when it doesn't work.' Daws grins. 'In this play I do almost everything, play so many characters. It's almost like going back to the days when I played the back end of a pantomime camel in Dick Whittington.' But the reason he can shine in this production is because he was that half of a camel. 'Yes, you do learn as you go along.' He laughs out loud. 'I do owe an awful lot to Esmarelda. For one thing, she got me my Equity Card.' Wodehouse in Wonderland, Assembly George Square Studios, until August 24, (excluding 18), at 6:10pm
Mint
26-05-2025
- Mint
Nilesh Jasani: Get set for a world of ever-evolving super-Einsteins
The early 2020s may well come to be remembered as the moment humanity discovered how to manufacture intelligence. At first, we welcomed chatbots—clever, conversational and occasionally cheeky, like digital butlers out of a Wodehouse novel. This was the Chatbot Era: amusing and useful, but still basic. Then came the current Agentic Era. No longer satisfied with talk, we sought action. Artificial intelligence (AI) has begun booking flights, editing selfies, navigating spreadsheets and doing several daily tasks. These early agents, while powerful, remain constrained—they are brilliant assistants, but still locked in their digital cribs. Also Read: Dave Lee: Apple must make peace with developers for AI success Yet, something far more transformative lies ahead. The third stage in this journey will see intelligence untethered from digital devices. This is when cognition escapes the screen and begins to permeate the physical world. Whether called embodied AI, robotics or the 'era of smart everything,' this phase will bring adaptive learning systems into everything from fork-lifts to furniture. Powered by action models, experience learning, multi-modal understanding and advanced hardware, machines will begin to learn from and reshape the world around them—physically, not just virtually. And even this would only be a warm-up. The fourth stage promises an intelligence explosion. We are rapidly approaching an era where the most complex and longstanding human challenges will be met with cognitive power vastly exceeding our own. Some AI models are already rivalling Olympiad-level students in mathematics. It is a matter of time before these systems surpass the most brilliant human minds in every discipline. This intelligence, endlessly scalable and tirelessly improving, will first prove its worth in the realm of health. Also Read: AI, identity and drama: Why everyone's turning into a character Smarter diagnostics as an early sign of Stage 4 success: While public fascination remains fixated on humanoid robots, self-driving cars and laundry-folding machines, the real transformation is already underway—in diagnostics. Here, AI has begun to outperform human experts in identifying disease from X-rays, cancer scans and medical imagery. These are not just marginal improvements. They are leaps in precision, speed and scalability. This diagnostic revolution is more than a healthcare upgrade. It signals AI's capacity to reason through complexity in ways that surpass even expert human cognition. If an algorithm can outperform trained radiologists, it suggests a broader capability to interpret, hypothesize and solve problems. These are cognitive feats previously limited to specialists. Now, machines are taking them on—and winning. Even if some of these breakthroughs still await peer-reviewed confirmation, the trend is unmistakable. Diagnostic models are showing that AI can attack complexity head-on, making decisions that would take humans days or weeks, within seconds. And diagnostics is only the beginning. Also Read: When AI gets a manager, you know the game has changed Drug discovery will be a bigger test: If diagnostics is about pattern recognition, drug discovery demands generative intelligence. It involves not only spotting problems, but imagining novel solutions, designing new molecules and validating hypotheses through layers of experimentation. Historically, biology has been structured around frameworks that made sense to humans—grouped proteins, labelled pathways, hierarchical taxonomies, etc. These simplifications helped us manage biochemical complexity but fell short of describing reality in full. Machines, however, are not bound by cognitive short-cuts. They operate across molecular spaces and mechanistic landscapes too vast for humans to hold in their mind. AI in drug discovery now proposes ideas, runs simulations and offers predictive insights across thousands of dimensions. Tools like Absci's zero-shot antibody generators can design viable drug candidates without needing examples. Recursion's phenomics platform screens tens of thousands of compound-cell combinations simultaneously. These capabilities hint at a new paradigm: one where machines don't just assist in discovery, they drive it. The real story isn't faster timelines or cheaper trials. It's the radical expansion of what's possible. AI is allowing science to ask more questions, explore more hypotheses and navigate a vastly larger solution space than ever before. Also Read: The agentic AI revolution isn't the future, it's already here This is only the beginning: What we see today is just the surface. Beneath it lies a revolution in how we interact with chemistry, biology and the material world. Synthetic biology is already leveraging AI to design gene circuits that function correctly on their first attempt. Antibody design is being reshaped by systems that require no training data. Whole-cell simulations are on the horizon. Predictive models now anticipate binding affinity, structural stability and biological impact without the need for physical experimentation. These shifts are not incremental; they're multiplicative. Each advance unlocks others. Taken together, they transform science from a linear process into something exponential. Beyond the spectacle: Today's headlines remain preoccupied with theatrical AI feats—machines that draft emails, pass exams, compose jingles or book your dinner reservation without being prompted. Entertaining, yes. Useful, perhaps. But these tasks belong to an ageing class of applications. The real story is elsewhere: We are not simply entering a world of better tools. We are entering a world with new minds—artificial ones that can reason in ways foreign to our own. These systems will not just support discovery; they will co-create it. Their thinking will be alien, powerful and deeply unfamiliar. And yet, increasingly, these tools will be indispensable. Also Read: The great AI reboot: Educators, techies and leaders all need to adapt fast At the same time, we are inevitably headed for complex terrain. Legal, ethical, moral, social and institutional questions—each deserving volumes of discussion—loom large. From accountability in autonomous systems to the governance of machine-generated knowledge, the implications are vast and underexplored. This article cannot do justice to those issues, but it can flag a simple truth: the genie is not going back in the bottle. What matters now is whether various communities—scientific, industrial, governmental and educational—start preparing for what lies ahead. Because Generative AI is not, and will not be, mostly about chatbots and digital assistants. Those tools dominate today's conversations, but they are unlikely to remain the defining story even a few quarters from now. We are on the cusp of something far greater. The sooner we recognize this, the better prepared we'll be for a future shaped not by chatterboxes or agents, but by minds we are only just beginning to comprehend. The author is a Singapore-based innovation investor for GenInnov Pte Ltd.
Los Angeles Times
18-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Need a balm for these troubled times? I recommend the works of P.G. Wodehouse
Seeking succor when the world seems to be closing in on you is a quintessentially human habit. Some people do it by gorging on comfort food like macaroni and cheese, others choose drink, or drugs, or gardening, or the warmth of a puppy. I always know when I'm feeling blue, because I feel the gravitational pull of my long shelf of P.G. Wodehouse books. If you've never read Wodehouse, I envy you the pleasure of discovering him for the first time. I'm well past that point; some of his stories and novels I've read dozens, even hundreds of times, and they can still make me convulse in laughter. More so when the outside world provides little to laugh about. Evelyn Waugh, who admitted to learning a hell of a lot from Wodehouse, may have put it best: 'Mr. Wodehouse's idyllic world can never stale,' he wrote in a 1961 essay designed in part to defend Wodehouse over the one blot on his life story (more on that in a bit). 'He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in.' And what is that world? It's timeless, and yet dated. Orwell narrowed it down to the Edwardian era — 1901 to 1919 — long before the irruptions of two world wars and the Great Depression. Its inhabitants are those of 'there will always be an England' England: stern vicars, timid curates, lords and earls, penniless titled wastrels living on allowances from their uncles, imperious aunts, upper-crust twits. They're all presented on the page by an inspired farceur whose exquisitely penned prose seems effortless, but belies the painstaking craftsmanship needed to make his split-second timing come off. Some Wodehouse lines are like time bombs, detonating with a momentary delay. My favorite comes in an exchange with the soupy Madeline Bassett in 'The Code of the Woosters,' when Bertie comes up with a quote he heard from Jeeves, actually the title of a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley, to describe his friend Gussie Fink-Nottle as 'a sensitive plant.' 'Exactly,' Madeline replies. 'You know your Shelley, Bertie.' 'Oh, am I?' Where to start with Wodehouse? He used several framing devices for his novels and short stories. The golf stories are narrated by the 'oldest member' of an upper-class golf club who buttonholes unwary younger members to regale them with his memories of golfers he has known. The peak of this series, to me, is 'Farewell to Legs,' featuring a playboy who takes a house in a placid golfing community and discomposes its dour Scottish golfers with his high jinks: 'Angus became aware with a sinking heart that here, as he had already begun to suspect, was a life-and-soul-of-the-party man, a perfect scream, and an absolutely priceless fellow who simply makes you die with the things he says.' Then there are the fish stories told by Mr. Mulliner at his local pub the Angler's Rest, involving his inexhaustible circle of relatives. To me, the glory of the Mulliner stories are a sequence of three stories — 'Mulliner's Buck-U-Uppo,' 'The Bishop's Move' and 'Gala Night,' all related to his brother Wilfred's invention of a tonic meant to 'provide Indian Rajahs with a specific which would encourage their elephants to face a tiger of the jungle with a jaunty sang-froid,' and what happens when unsuspecting users swallow a tumblerful of something that should be taken by the teaspoon. Some are set in New York and Hollywood, where Wodehouse spent some time writing lyrics for musicals with Jerome Kern and others. (His best-known song is probably 'Bill,' from 'Show Boat.') But at the summit of Wodehouse's genius are the stories of Bertie Wooster and his 'gentleman's personal gentleman,' or valet, Jeeves. Of the short stories, all narrated by Bertie, to my mind the greatest are a trilogy beginning with 'The Great Sermon Handicap,' continuing with 'The Purity of the Turf,' and concluding with what may be the single funniest short story ever penned in English, 'The Metropolitan Touch.' Bertie and Jeeves, as the British essayist Alexander Cockburn once asserted, are a pairing as momentous in literary history as Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, or Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. Wodehouse never exhausted the counterpoint between Bertie's slangy gibbering and half-remembered literary allusions with Jeeves' carefully modulated responses: 'Very well, Jeeves, you agree with me that the situation is a lulu?' 'Certainly a somewhat sharp crisis in your affairs would appear to have been precipitated, sir.' Bertie is both a classic unreliable narrator and a stock comic character given life. Having inherited a fortune from parents who are almost never mentioned, he's rich enough for financial difficulties to never be a plot obstruction, though he's always willing to tide over a pal brought low by 'unfortunate speculations' at the racecourse. Jeeves is a deus ex machina; we learn almost nothing about him, except for imperturbability and skill at solving the crises that Bertie falls into through his pure cloth-headedness. Bertie's romantic relations are entirely sexless, 20th-century echoes of courtly love, though throughout the oeuvre he gets engaged to at least six women by my count. Among them towers the frighteningly domineering Honoria Glossop. ('Honoria, you see, is one of those robust, dynamic girls with the muscles of a welter-weight and a laugh like a squadron of cavalry charging over a tin bridge.') Jeeves extricates Bertie from every one of these entanglements, and thankfully so, because every fiancée begins their relationship with the determination to toss Jeeves out on his ear. Wodehouse aficionados wage a never-ending debate over which Jeeves and Wooster book is his masterpiece, with 'The Code of the Woosters' (1938) and 'Joy in the Morning' (1946) typically trading the top two spots. I'm partial to the former, in part because it features the only overtly political character Wodehouse ever devised. He's Roderick Spode, a would-be British dictator plainly based on the real-life British fascist and Hitler partisan Oswald Mosley. Spode is the leader of a gang of fascist toughs known as the Black Shorts. 'You mean 'shorts,' don't you?' Bertie says when he first hears about Spode. 'No,' he's told, 'by the time Spode formed his association, there were no shirts left. He and his adherents wear black shorts.' 'Footer bags, you mean?' Bertie asks, a Britishism for football shorts. 'How perfectly foul.' Spode throws his weight around Brinkley Court, the country estate where the story takes place, harrying Bertie endlessly for reasons we don't need to go into, until Jeeves provides Bertie with a magic word guaranteed to turn dictator Spode into a shrinking mouse. At the climax, Bertie presses his advantage, informing his nemesis: 'The trouble with you, Spode, is that just because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of half-wits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you're someone. You hear them shouting 'Heil, Spode,' and you imagine it is the Voice of the People. That is where you make your bloomer. What the Voice of the People is saying is: 'Look at that frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags. Did you ever in your puff see such a perfect perisher?'' It's no spoiler to tell you that the magic word Jeeves provides to Bertie is 'Eulalie.' As for who or what Eulalie is, and why it reduces Spode to jelly, you'll have to read the book. That brings us to that one blot on Wodehouse's life. When World War II broke out, he was living peaceably in the French resort of Le Touquet. When the Nazis came through in 1940 they interned Wodehouse and transported him to Berlin, from which the Germans persuaded him to make a handful of 'nonpolitical' radio broadcasts for his British compatriots. There was an uproar at home. Newspaper columnists condemned Wodehouse as a 'Quisling,' libraries took his books off their shelves, there were condemnatory speeches in Parliament. The truth is that the broadcasts were indeed nonpolitical; if the Germans thought they had scored a propaganda victory it was instantly evident that they were wrong, and they halted the broadcasts after only five. Wodehouse had displayed nothing worse than the stupidity of the innocent. He knew nothing of the political context, much less that his broadcasts came at a moment when the very future of Britain was in question. But that fit precisely with Wodehouse's literary landscape. Farce, of course, depends on its characters' failure to recognize what is near at hand; Wodehouse in his splendid isolation in France and in a bygone fictional Eden was incapable of recognizing the crisis in Britain was so near at hand that his broadcasts would strike hard at his countrymen's diminishing morale. Orwell's opinion of Wodehouse's attackers was withering. 'It was excusable to be angry at what Wodehouse did,' he wrote in 1946, 'but to go on denouncing him three or four years later — and more, to let an impression remain that he acted with conscious treachery — is not excusable. Few things in this war have been more morally disgusting than the present hunt after traitors and Quislings. At best it is largely the punishment of the guilty by the guilty. ... In England the fiercest tirades against Quislings are uttered by Conservatives who were practicing appeasement in 1938 and Communists who were advocating it in 1940.' One could go on. The pleasures of Wodehouse are inexhaustible, so I'll stop here. With some news about Trump's tariffs threatening to disturb my peace today, and having just finished a rereading of 'The Code of the Woosters,' I will share the next few hours with G. Darcy ('Stilton') Cheesewright, Zenobia Hopwood, Edwin the Boy Scout, Boko Fittleworth and Percy, Lord Worplesdon, and their horseplay in and around Steeple Bumpleigh, Hampshire. Looking back on the affair and its satisfying resolution, Bertie tells Jeeves, 'There's an expression on the tip of my tongue which seems to me to sum the whole thing up. ... Something about Joy doing something.' 'Joy cometh in the morning, sir?' 'That's the baby. Not one of your things, is it?' 'No, sir.' 'Well, it's dashed good.'
