What Ho! P. G. Wodehouse on Hollywood

'It isn't half such a crazy place as it's made out to be. I know two- three people in Hollywood that are part sane.' A talking gorilla called Cyril who graduated from Oxford University; a sword-wielding diva driven crazy by her orange juice diet; an English milord swapping bodies with a gobby 12 year-old film star - these are screwball plots even by P. G. 'Plum' Wodehouse's brilliant comic standards. But not so surprising when we learn they take place in 'the weirdest place' he had ever worked - Hollywood. Paul Kent's eighth essay on matters Wodehousean is a backstage pass to 'Dottyville-on-the-Pacific's' Golden Age in the 1930's, replete with glamour, glitter and the monstrous egos of its biggest movers and shakers. You'll be SHOCKED! You'll be THRILLED! - but above all, you'll be ENTERTAINED!

Paul Kent is the Vice-Chairman of the P G Wodehouse Society (UK), and has been a fan of the great man for longer than he cares to remember. Between 2019 and 2022, he published a trilogy of books that offers a comprehensive tour of Wodehouse's creative imagination - 'This is jolly old Fame', 'Mid-Season Form' and 'The Happiness of the World' - which seeks to prove that Plum was not just a great comic writer, but a great writer, period. Books 4 and 5 of the trilogy - respectively 'Plum's Literary Heroes' and 'Plum at the Theatre' - are currently in preparation; and the first ten occasional essays entitled What Ho! are available now: they are Wodehouse on Food, Sport, Love, Money, Class, Cats, Dogs, Hollywood, Fashion, Childhood, and Faith.