Clive Exton

Barking in Essex review

Barking in Essex by the television writer Clive Exton, who died seven years ago, is so bad it's almost a collector's item.

Barking In Essex review

Sheila Hancock, Lee Evans and Keeley Hawes star in Clive Exton's ill-judged black farce.

Barking in Essex review

Clive Exton's play is neither sufficiently dark nor consistently funny.

With their grand houses and period settings, it's a wonder PG Wodehouse's work hasn't been plundered by television more often. Clive Exton's exuberant Nineties adaptations of Jeeves and Wooster, starring Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, were highly successful, but there has been nothing since. However, judging by the iffy first episode of this new six-part series, based on the Blandings Castle stories and reworked by Guy Andrews, it seems that Wodehouse's precise comic world is pretty hard to pull off.

The problem lies not with the cast, which is certainly top-notch. Timothy Spall plays bumbling Lord Clarence Emsworth, more interested in pigs than people. Jennifer Saunders delights as his battleaxe sister Connie. And there's good work from Jack Farthing as Clarence's hapless son Freddie, and Mark Williams as Beach, the butler. But the episode can't quite sustain the necessary brio and the bonhomie eventually wears thin. Tonight's tale involves Clarence's rivalry with neighbour Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe (Robert Bathurst) over a Fattest Pig competition and Connie's attempt to prevent niece Angela (Alice Orr-Ewing) from an unsuitable marriage.

I can't but feel that Fry is wrong for Jeeves. Too young for one thing but he will still be wrong when he is too old. However, Fry and Laurie are probably indissoluble like Damon and Pythias or Crosse & Blackwell.

It will be impossible to read the book again without hearing the swoop of Geraldine McEwan's voice and the sound of eyelids being narrowed. She has, as great performers do, laid waste the part for those who follow.

The Crescent seems to consist largely of stewed pseuds. There seems no hour of the day or night in which tired and emotional residents can be trusted to walk a straight white line or end up in their own beds. While funny on paper, it reminds me of a well written Crossroads. And it is evident that to write Crossroads well is to ruin it.

There is not one family in The Crezz whom one wouldn't emigrate to avoid. This, I'm inclined to think, could be a disadvantage if Thames see the series as a middle class Coronation Street, a thinking man's Crossroads.