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.

Radio Times review

The first series of these adaptations of PG Wodehouse stories came in for a good kicking from some quarters, which seemed out of proportion considering they were enjoyable bits of candy floss and hardly Broadchurch. But viewers liked them, so here's a second helping, with Timothy Spall once again starring as pin-brained, pig-obsessed toff Lord Emsworth and Jennifer Saunders as his battleaxe of a sister, Connie.

Tim Vine, much missed after his departure from Not Going Out, takes over from Mark Williams as Beach, the clever butler. Harry Enfield guests in the first episode as the claret-nosed Duke of Dunstable, an appalling old buffer with an inexplicable antipathy towards whistling Scotsmen.

How posh are the cast of Blandings?

Meet Timothy Spall, Jennifer Saunders, Tim Vine and Celia Imrie, the cast of BBC1's PG Wodehouse comedy Blandings.

Press views: Jeeves and Wooster

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.

BBC Northern Ireland has just turned out one of the best documentary dramas I have seen in years: Wodehouse in Exile (BBC Four), the story of PG Wodehouse and the calamitous moment in his life when he broadcast on German radio early in the Second World War.

Sebastian Faulks to revive Wodehouse's Jeeves & Wooster

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.