Jeeves and Wooster: Bridegroom Wanted!

Jeeves and Wooster: Bridegroom Wanted!
ITV
30 May 1993
Historical Comedy
DVD
B-

For the most part, this is a definite improvement over the previous episode, although it does have a cop-out ending.  Not that it's not sort of amusing to see Jeeves and Wooster after eight months lost at sea in a lifeboat (Bertie was in charge of the compass), but it seems like Jeeves should've been clever enough to find a solution when several angry people confront Bertie on a ship bound for London.  This episode combines two London-set plots and plops them into the Big Apple without too much damage.  Bingo #2 (Pip Torrens) falls in love again, but this time he gets married, unfortunately to the author that Bertie has been masquerading as for about a year, according to Lord Bittlesham (more like two years onscreen).  Meanwhile, Honoria Glossop has a romance with a doctor who works for her father (the young doctor is a novelist in the original), and her father is in love with his nurse.  Bertie hires a brassy actress to pretend to be his fiancee, but of course things go seriously awry.

Philip Locke takes over as a much friendlier-to-Bertie Sir Roderick Glossop.  (And in this version of things, Lady Glossop has run off with another man, rather than died, as I think she did in print, unless I'm misremembering.)  It's nice to see Geoffrey Toone is back as Lord Bittlesham, and for that matter Liz Kettle as Honoria Glossop, among the few who have not been recast over the years.  With the New York adventures at an end, Joseph Mydell makes his last appearance as Coneybear.  And Peter Carlisle returns as the Bookseller.