PG Wodehouse

With Blandings principally consisting of posh people strolling about being aristocratically bonkers, these adaptations of PG Wodehouse are like watching an episode of Downton where everyone has been on the gin all night. Which actually makes it rather more entertaining.

Helped no end by guest casting that included Mathew Baynton (The Wrong Mans) and Geoffrey McGivern (This Is Jinsy), the story of Throwing Eggs pretty much began and ended with the title. But it worked a treat.

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A West End vehicle for PG Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster characters has been received enthusiastically by critics.

What ho! Jeeves and Wooster head for West End

Almost a hundred years on from their first appearance in print, PG Wodehouse's comic creations Jeeves and Wooster are being resurrected on stage. Matthew Macfadyen will play valet Jeeves with Stephen Mangan as the dim but amiable Bertie Wooster in Perfect Nonsense, by Robert and David Goodale.

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Best-selling author Sebastian Faulks is to pen a book featuring PG Wodehouse's classic characters, Jeeves and Wooster.

This series based on the PG Wodehouse stories rolls to a close with house guest Lady Littlewood (Jessica Hynes) in suspiciously hot pursuit of Timothy Spall's borderline-amnesiac Earl of Emsworth. It's about as close to actual intrigue as this slice of inter-war frippery has got, relying as it does on stock storylines and stubbornly recurring themes (a prominent one being the digestive trials and tribulations of the Empress, the Earl's pet pig).

Guy Andrews's adaptations didn't need to be so straight forward and predictable - there's an awful lot of original Blandings material to mine and the show could have been denser than Lord Emsworth himself. But the advantage of the undemanding plot is the space it allows to wallow in the characters' gloriously ad hoc idiom: the endless variations on his suitor's name as misremembered by Emsworth, the way his son Freddie describes himself in his half-cut state as being 'tight as an owl', and the impending threat of the Empress morphing into 'tragic sausages' on the breakfast table.

The casting may be more eccentric than the storylines but there's a jolliness to these adaptations by Guy Andrews, from the stories of PG Wodehouse. Tonight's concluding tale sees the household at Blandings Castle take drastic action when befuddled Lord Emsworth (Timothy Spall) falls under the spell of a gold-digging marchioness (Jessica Hynes). Meanwhile, dipsomaniac heir Freddie (Jack Farthing) has sworn off women altogether - until he meets the Amazonian beauty drafted in to de-gas the Empress.

Singer Paloma Faith guest-stars as Georgia, a grating cockney showgirl brought to Blandings by cockscomb-haired idiot Freddie. Georgia takes an instant shine to clenched butler Beach, who's terrified.

Guy Andrews's adaptations of PG Wodehouse's stories have come in for flak from some viewers for being empty piffle, shorn of Wodehouse's wit. They have a point, and it's hard to see who the stories are aimed at. Still, Blandings fills a need for a bit of nonsense on a Sunday afternoon, where it's won audiences of more than five million. So there are many people who will doubtless enjoy David Walliams's return as fussy secretary Baxter.

Beefy Popjoy, Herr Schnellhund, Paquita Manganara: the characters in Guy Andrews's adaptations of PG Wodehouse's stories have such gloriously ludicrous names you can't help but smile. This week a German dance teacher (David Bamber) is drafted in to help Lord Emsworth with his footwork while the sublimely foolish Freddie has managed to marry a girl who speaks no English. He met her in a club "dancing around in a girdle of soft fruit" so he's trying to keep this from his formidable Aunt Connie in case "she soars over my cranium and feasts on my brains". "A meagre luncheon that will be" is Emsworth's cutting response.

Mistaken identity. Funny foreigners. Sham marriages. Poorly domesticated animals. Class consciousness. Lashings of slapstick. To watch Blandings is to realise that PG Wodehouse's knockabout tales, for better or worse, enshrined many of the rules for the British TV sitcom. And Guy Andrews's light comedy proves a perfectly charming diversion, bowled along by fine performances (Timothy Spall is superb as the perpetually bamboozled Clarence) and the potential for farce offered by the amorous entanglements of callow young Freddie and Gertrude, this week romancing a Portuguese dancer and oafish Reverend 'Beefy' Bingham respectively. Sometimes one does yearn for a character with an IQ over ten (Mark Williams's wry butler is a little too enigmatic to count), and it's undeniably slight, but it's carried off with real charm and craft.