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The abiding joy of Wodehouse is that he never became ‘an adult’. As his cherished chronicler, Richard Usborne, happily still with us at 92, writes in Plum Sauce (Ebury Press, £14.99, pp. 232, ISBN 0091883008 -the same title, incidentally, used for the charming show by that peerless performer of the Master’s work, Jonathan Cecil, and his wife Anna Sharkey):
His books were always young and all his elders, even the stuffed shirts, had been young once. Even the awesome Roderick Spode, Lord Sidcup, had stolen a policeman’s helmet on Boat Race Night and was still proud of it. You can be sure, with Wodehouse, that David will defeat Goliath, the schoolboy will outwit the master, the chorus girl will rise to be a star, or, at very least, will marry an earl, the poor will sock the rich, the Pekinese will rout the Alsatian, the curate will get a vicarage, the young man, with a nose broken by boxing or playing rugger for his Varsity, will marry the pretty girl whose kitten he has rescued.
The ‘signature dishes’ of Aunt Dahlia’s legendary chef Anatole – Mignonette de poulet petil duc, and all the rest – are among the amazing assortment of unconsidered trifles snapped up by Ben Schott in Schott’s Original Miscellany (Bloomsbury, £9.99, pp. 159, ISBN 0747563209). I found this compellingly addictive anthology impossible to put down. If you know any sad people, like me, who love tabulating useless information and shouting at the screen during television quizzes, then here is the perfect stocking-filler. Thanks to Schott, I can now throw in such nouns of assemblage as ‘a malapertness of pedlars’, ‘a mumuration of starlings’ and ‘a muster of peacocks’. I can keep pace with my fellow Harrovian, John McCririck, on the odds: ‘Cockle’ is 10-1. I have added to my vocabulary of Cockney rhyming slang such gems as ‘Chalfont St Giles’ ‘Mickey Bliss’ and ‘Sherbet Dab’. And I now know that the pop impresario Joe Meek ‘shot his landlady and himself’ and that King Theinhko of Burma was killed by a farmer whose cucumbers he ate without permission in 931 AD. The farmer was then proclaimed the monarch and was known as ‘the Cucumber King’.
Royal wit is fairly thinly spread in Thomas Blaikie’s compendium, You Look Awfully Like the Queen (Fourth Estate, £9.99, pp. 104, ISBN 0007148747), but I relished the story of Princess Margaret being heckled during her party-piece rendition of ‘My Old Man’s a Dustman’. Among those to give tongue was Francis Bacon: ‘Shut up, you old bag.’
You also have to look quite hard to find the jokes in The Essential Spike Milligan compiled by Alexander Games (Fourth Estate, £16.99, pp. 344, ISBN 0007155093), though some of Spike’s surreal asides make it worth the effort. His simple, absurdly logical word-play gags remain the most rewarding as in his 1956 seasonal hit record, ‘I’m Walking Backwards for Christmas’: ‘I’ve tried walking sideways, and walking to the front,/ But people just look at me and say it’s a publicity stunt
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