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| PG TIPS  THE MORNING AFTER
Sam Rockwell as PG Wodehouse’s bad-boy hero, Jim Crocker.
piccadilly jim
Always thought PG Wodehouse was a toff writing about toffs? Wrong, says John McKay,
director of the star-studded Wodehouse adaptation
Piccadilly Jim: he’s actually rather, er, groovy.
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PG Wodehouse is a writer who satirised the behaviour of the fashionable British upper classes in the early years of the last century, but he did so so effectively that we’ve come to think he actually believed in all the values he was lampooning - that he really wanted to be like his two most famous characters, Bertie Wooster and his butler, Jeeves.
Written in 1917, Piccadilly Jim gives the lie to this interpretation by the simple device of introducing something quite new into the world where Bertie used to reign supreme: Americans.
The title character is a young American called Jim Crocker (Sam Rockwell), who lives in London with his stepmother, Eugenia (Allison Janney). He writes a newspaper arts column under the pseudonym Piccadilly Jim and, one day, is more than usually nasty about a poem by a young writer.
Allison Janney and Tom Wilkinson
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Shortly afterwards, he meets a gorgeous creature called Ann (Frances O’Connor) and falls instantly in love with her - only to discover that she is the aforementioned poet. There then ensues one of those situations of escalating absurdity in which Wodehouse specialised, as Jim invents a new identity and then is forced deeper and deeper into deception as he tries to maintain the charade. Nor is Ann simply a helpless flapper, dragged along in the wake of the roguish but likeable Jim: by the end of the story, she has become pretty involved in the deception, too.
Piccadilly Jim populates thirties London with a rich gallery of characters played by what Bertie Wooster would have called the crème de la crème of the acting profession on both sides of the Atlantic, including Brenda Blethyn as the super-snobbish Nesta Pet; Hugh Bonneville as Reggie Wisbech, a dashing young aristocrat who turns out to be a complete fraud; and Oscar nominee Tom Wilkinson as Tom’s thespian father, Bingley Crocker, who has somehow ended up married to Jim’s mother, but dreams of getting right out of London and moving to New York.
The novel has been adapted for the screen by Julian Fellowes, who won an Oscar for his Gosford Park screenplay, and is directed in defiantly iconoclastic fashion by young Scottish director John McKay, whose previous credits include the woman-behaving-badly movie Crush, with Andie MacDowell, Imelda Staunton and Anna Chancellor; and the acclaimed Miller’s Tale episode in the recent BBC adaptation of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.
McKay had seen Wodehouse adaptations before on television, and wasn’t about to enter into that world of cut-glass accents, jolly japes and country-house weekends. As he explains below, he was determined to find a way of ‘doing’ Wodehouse that was about the thirties but belonged firmly in 2004, rather than being seen through some distorting mirror called ‘thirties comedy’.
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