Roderick Spode - The Black Shorts

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 England, 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-wing 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:

The trouble with you, Spode, is that just because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of half-wits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you're someone. You hear them shouting "Heil, Spode!" and you imagine it is the Voice of the People. That is where you make your bloomer. What the Voice of the People is saying is: "Look at that frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags! Did you ever in your puff see such a perfect perisher?" —P. G. Wodehouse, Bertie Wooster in The Code of the Woosters (1938)

In the TV series Jeeves and Wooster, the Black Shorts are portrayed as a tiny group of around a dozen teenage-boys and men. 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.