Wodehouse, in his words, preferred to spread “sweetness and light”.

Just look at those titles: Nothing Serious, Laughing Gas, Joy in the Morning. With every sparkling joke, every well-meaning and innocent character, every farcical tussle with angry swans and pet Pekingese, every utopian description of a stroll around the grounds of a pal’s stately home or a flutter on the choir boys’ hundred yards handicap at a summer village fete, he wanted to whisk us far away from our worries.

Writing about being a humourist in his autobiography Over Seventy, Wodehouse quoted two people in the Talmud who had earnt their place in Heaven: “We are merrymakers. When we see a person who is downhearted, we cheer him up.”

A crafter of perfect sentences

Nearly three decades on, I’m currently rewatching the DVDs with my daughter, and Jeeves and Wooster is still pretty much flawless. When I interviewed Laurie in 2000, I gushed about the series, and he cited what was, at the time, his favourite Wodehouse line: “The drowsy stillness of the afternoon was shattered by what sounded to his strained senses like GK Chesterton falling on a sheet of tin.”

There are so many other lines he could have gone for. How about this one?

“It is never difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine.”

Or this?

“It isn’t often that Aunt Dahlia lets her angry passions rise, but when she does, strong men climb trees and pull them up after them.”

Or this?

“Like so many substantial citizens of America, he had married young and kept on marrying, springing from blonde to blonde like the chamois of the Alps leaping from crag to crag.”

The one that has me chuckling to myself on a regular basis is this Bertie Wooster gem from the novel Right Ho, Jeeves: “‘Very good,” I said coldly. ‘In that case, tinkerty tonk.’ And I meant it to sting.”