Robert Fairclough

The first life of the man who was Lord Peter Wimsey, Bertie Wooster and starred in I’ m Alright, Jack!

With the death of Ian Carmichael in 2010 one of the last links was lost with the golden age of British cinema. Carmichael starred alongside Terry-Thomas and Peter Sellers in the Boulting brothers’ classic satirical comedies I’ m Alright, Jack! Private’ s Progress and School for Scoundrels. He summed up, on screen and in life, the kind of Englishman who was beginning to emerge after the war – educated, not necessarily upper class, upwardly mobile and a study in good manners and a sense of fair play – and thus played the straight-man foil to the distracted ravings of his wilder co-stars.

Subsequently, he became Bertie Wooster in a highly successful television series based on P.G. Wodehouse’ s Jeeves stories. He also made the part of Lord Peter Wimsey his own in another long-running adaptation of Dorothy L. Sayers’ famous detective novels, and was still acting on television well into his eighties alongside Susan Hampshire in ITV’ s drama series The Royal.