Much as Jeeves was to extricate Bertie time and time again from the soup so

Much as Jeeves was to extricate Bertie time and time again from the soup, so Psmith is the eternal saviour of stolid, dependable Mike Jackson – the Doctor Watson to Psmith’s Sherlock Holmes.There is in fact a little thread of autobiography in the second Psmith novel, Psmith in the City. Said to have been drawn from life (one Rupert D’Oyley Carte, of the Savoy Opera family), Psmith is a startling sophisticate, an expelled old Etonian whose delicately attuned nervous system can be shocked by loud colours, celluloid cuffs and the mere mention of an inadequately pressed trouser crease. He started writing at the end of the 19th century and continued until his death, manuscript on lap, on 14 February 1975 at the age of 93.It can be clearly stated that Wodehouse’s first great creation, and for some his finest, was Psmith (the “P” is silent). Like Jeeves, Wodehouse stands alone, and analysis is useless.Chronology, with Wodehouse, is not necessarily reliable or relevant, but it seems sensible to describe his creations in a more or less historical order – an order compromised by his tendency to introduce a character in a short story and only later pick up and, as it were, run with the ball. You don’t analyse such sunlit perfection, you just bask in its warmth and splendour. Here is an example that certainly vindicates my point about his prose working best on the page.

Reading this aloud is not much use:”Sir Jasper Finch-Farrowmere?” said Wilfred.”ffinch-ffarrowmere,” corrected the visitor, his sensitive ear detecting the capitals.Then there is a passage such as this, Lord Emsworth musing on his feckless younger son, Freddie Threepwood.Unlike the male codfish, which, suddenly finding itself the parent of three million five hundred thousand little codfish, cheerfully resolves to love them all, the British aristocracy is apt to look with a somewhat jaundiced eye on its younger sons.If you are immune to such writing, you are fit, to use one of Wodehouse’s favourite Shakespearean quotations, only for treasons, stratagems and spoils. Characteristic, too, are the sublimely hyperbolic similes: “Roderick Spode. Big chap with a small moustache and the sort of eye that can open an oyster at sixty paces”, or, “The stationmaster’s whiskers are of a Victorian bushiness and give the impression of having been grown under glass”. But once you dive into the soufflé, once you engage with all those miraculous verbal felicities, such adulation begins to make sense.Example serves better than description Let me throw up some more random nuggets.

Particular to Wodehouse are the transferred epithets: “I lit a rather pleased cigarette”, or, “I pronged a moody forkful of eggs and b”. If you had never read Wodehouse and only knew about the world his books inhabit, you might be forgiven for blinking in bewilderment at the praise that has been lavished on a “mere” comic author by writers such as Compton Mackenzie, Evelyn Waugh, Hilaire Belloc, Bernard Levin and Susan Hill. And that is the point, really: one of the gorgeous privileges of reading Wodehouse is that he makes us feel better about ourselves because we derive a sense of personal satisfaction from the laughter mutually created. Every comma, every “sir”, every “what?” is something we make work in the act of reading.”The greatest living writer of prose”, “the Master”, “the head of my profession”, “akin to Shakespeare”, “a master of the language”… It may still be amusing when delivered as dramatic dialogue, but no actors are as good as the actors we each of us carry in our head. There are three branches of the Bassington-Bassington family – the Shropshire Bassington-Bassingtons, the Hampshire Bassington-Bassingtons, and the Kent Bassington-Bassingtons.”"England seems pretty well stocked up with Bassington-Bassingtons.”"Tolerably so, sir.”"No chance of a sudden shortage, I mean, what?”Well, try as hard as actors might, such an exchange will always work best on the page.

The language, however, lives and breathes in its written, printed form Let me use an example, taken at random. I flip open a book of stories and happen on Bertie and Jeeves discussing a young man called Cyril Bassington-Bassington.”I’ve never heard of him. Have you ever heard of him, Jeeves?”"I am familiar with the name Bassington-Bassington, sir. If we were reasonably competent, then all of us concerned in the television version could go some way towards conveying a fair sense of the narrative of the stories and revealing, too, a good deal of the nature of their characters.