Neil Clark

An actor from the age of elegance

Neil Clark salutes Ian Carmichael, the definitive Wooster, who died last week. He personified the good manners, loyalty and self-effacement of Britain in days gone by

I don’t think I have ever been so nervous before a telephone call. I had written to Ian Carmichael, via his agent, to ask if I could interview him for an article I was writing on the late Dennis Price, who had played Jeeves to Carmichael’s Bertie Wooster in the 1960s BBC series The World of Wooster.

Carmichael had written back to say that he’d ‘try to oblige’ if I telephoned him at his North Yorkshire home. ‘I don’t think I’ll be very much help,’ he added. ‘Dennis was a very private man.’ Hardly encouraging.

I was nervous because Carmichael, like Price, was a hero of mine. I had been brought up watching his films, and although too young to remember The World of Wooster, I had loved his portrayal of the detective Lord Peter Wimsey on television in the 1970s.

Suppose Carmichael — the epitome of cheerful affability on screen, turned out to be an old curmudgeon in real life?

I needn’t have worried. Carmichael, from the minute he picked up the phone to the time he put it down, almost an hour later, could not have been friendlier. We chatted not only about poor Dennis Price, who had died a bloated alcoholic at the age of 58, but films, the weather (it was snowing heavily that day) and cricket (one of Carmichael’s great passions).

Carmichael was incredibly easy to talk to — it really did feel as if I was chatting to someone I had known all my life, which in a way of course, I had. We kept in contact, and after my article on Price was published I received a very generous hand-written letter from him saying how much he had enjoyed it. But with characteristic modesty, he declined the opportunity of an article about himself — one I would dearly love to have written.

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