At some stage I'll write an entry that isn't about an adaptation of a book I love, but not yet. Because I had mixed feelings about the new Radio 4 Code of the Woosters which I'd been greatly looking forward to. Why, oh why, did the adapter and producer feel the need to insert whacky sound effects and other slapstick capers? Totally unneccessary. And I got the impression that Marcus Brigstocke was trying too hard not to sound like Giles Wemmbley-Hogg, and so he sometimes sounded a bit strained instead (the funniest bits were the bits when he sounded like Giles, who sounds like Bertie anyway).
In non-pedantic news, two stout robins have fashioned a nest in our back garden! I'd noticed a robin hanging around the end of the garden, but the other day we noticed that it kept flying into the ivy that covers the garden wall. And yesterday there were two robins, who kept gathering twigs and bits of grass and taking them into the same secluded spot. The temptation to take a peek is great, but I'll keep off their territory...
In non-pedantic news, two stout robins have fashioned a nest in our back garden! I'd noticed a robin hanging around the end of the garden, but the other day we noticed that it kept flying into the ivy that covers the garden wall. And yesterday there were two robins, who kept gathering twigs and bits of grass and taking them into the same secluded spot. The temptation to take a peek is great, but I'll keep off their territory...
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stellanova- The Monkey Princess
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Also, I have When the Red Red Robin... on the album I was just raving about. I am all "live, love, laugh and be happy" at the moment.
Oh, but does the ivy cover a secret door? We must be told!
Oh! I didn't even think of that, how shameful. And maybe it does cover a secret door, there could be anything in there...
I think that album sounds like the greatest thing ever! And 'When the Red Red Robin' has now become our garden robins' theme tune.
I have Fry and Laurie series box set too! I actually still had my tapes of it recorded off the telly back in 1990 (or whenever) until the box set came out. It remains one of the few adaptations of a much-loved book that didn't disappoint me. Although the last series, I recall, wasn't quite as good - lots of added slapstick with Bertie dressing up in frocks and suchlike. Why do some producers believe Wodehouse can be improved by some "hilarious" pratfalls (or whacky sound effects in the new Radio 4 version)? He doesn't need it!
Have you thought of combining both sartorial inspirations? Nice tweed suit with a big stag's head for a hat, that sort of thing?
PG wrote some 90 books over his lifetime so I'm confining my Everyman collection to the Jeeves and Wooster novels, the Mulliner stuff and the odd Blandings novel. Even so, I've lashed out a couple of hundred quid. But it's worth it when I caress the heavy, cream pages, gathered and sewn as they are by masters of the binders art, and delight in the fonts within and the cloth boards without.
Leave me Gisburne. I would be alone with my volumes...