Plum

I don't get it, I just don't get it: this adulation from well known people, some of them well known writers (like Evelyn Waugh no less), for P.G.Wodehouse. I have never been able to read more than a few pages of any of his books; I don't find the main characters very interesting, rather tiresome I think are Jeeves and Wooster, and the subsidiary characters are , well, "characters", cardboard cut-outs of English upper class toffs.
Rupert Christianson, writing in The Telegraph about a year ago about Alan Bennett's play "The History Boys" (by the way, am I the only person in the world who thought it pedestrain?) mentioned certain artists he did not much like: Wodehouse was amoung them; John Gielgud another; and Bruckner. I was glad to see Woodhouse there but not too pleased to see Gielgud by his side, so to speak. As for Bruckner, well he's an acquired taste - one I have not quite acquired yet but, like the parson's egg, I feel he's good in parts.
Yet, though I can't read P.G.Woodhouse (whom his admirers call "Plum" for some reason I don't know and really don't wish to know), I still like to hear about him: the way he lived, his success at writing lyrics for musicals, his so-called collaboration with the Germans in WW2 and so on; and I have to say that I have enjoyed the radio plays that were done a couple of years ago, don't know why but they made me smile.
I know only one of his songs, the one from "Showboat": "Along Came Bill". I read somewhere that he had written it originally for another of Jerome Kern's shows but Kern hadn't used it; now when he decided to use it, Oscar Hammerstein who was writing the book and lyrics for "Showboat" objected to its inclusion.
Well I'm glad Kern won the argument because it's a marvellous song. Actually, though, it is, as Hammerstein probably saw, it is completely out of place there.