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Roderick Spode, 7th Earl of Sidcup, often known as Spode or Lord Sidcup, is a recurring fictional character from the Jeeves novels of British comic writer P. G. Wodehouse, being an "amateur dictator" and the leader of a fictional fascist group in London called The Black Shorts. In the 1990s television series, ''Jeeves and Wooster'', he is portrayed by John Turner and depicted as having a rather Hitleresque appearance. ==Overview== Spode is a large and intimidating figure, appearing "as if Nature had intended to make a gorilla, and had changed its mind at the last moment". He is constantly in love with Madeline Bassett, and though he intended to remain a bachelor during his career as a dictator, he nevertheless attempted to protect her from men "playing fast and loose"; to this end, he threatened on several occasions to beat Bertie Wooster and Gussie Fink-Nottle to a jelly. He marches his followers around London and the countryside, preaching loudly to the public on the dissoluteness of modern society until a heckler hits him in the eye with a potato (reinterpreted in the TV series as turnips thrown by Barmy and Tuppy). ==The Black Shorts== Spode is modelled after Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, who were nicknamed the ''blackshirts''. Spode was at first an 'amateur dictator' who led a farcical group of fascists called the Saviours of Britain, better known as the Black Shorts. Spode adopted black shorts as a uniform because, according to Gussie Fink-Nottle in ''The Code of the Woosters'', "by the time Spode formed his association, there were no shirts left" – alluding to various fascist or right-radical groups: Mussolini's Blackshirts, Hitler's brownshirts, the Irish Blueshirts and Greenshirts, the South African Greyshirts, Mexico's Gold shirts, and the American Silver Shirts. Bertie Wooster believes that wearing black shorts is an extreme social and sartorial faux pas (shorts being inappropriate for a grown man outside a sporting context) and uses it to make fun of Spode: In the television series ''Jeeves and Wooster'', the Black Shorts are portrayed as a tiny group of around a dozen men and teenage boys. They comprise the small, but enthusiastic, audience to whom Spode makes loud, dramatic speeches in which he announces bizarre statements of policy, such as giving each citizen at birth a British–made bicycle and umbrella, widening the rails of the entire British railway network, so sheep may stand sideways on trains, the banning of the import of foreign root-vegetables and the compulsory, scientific measurement of all male knees. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Roderick Spode」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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