PG Wodehouse

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.

A pig eating cake was the most amusing thing about BBC1's Sunday teatime comedy Blandings, which can't have been the intention of PG Wodehouse, whose tales of upper-class twittery inspired this waste of half an hour. Timothy Spall gave good drawl as eccentric Lord Emsworth and Mark Williams was as solid as you'd expect as the long-suffering butler; but civilisation has come too far to put trouserless yokels cavorting on a table in the hope of laughter.

David Walliams guest-stars as Baxter, a pernickety secretary brought in by the formidable Aunt Constance to clear up the mess of her halfwitted brother Lord Emsworth (Timothy Spall).

He starts by re-classifying his boss's marbles collection. "I promise you, I will regularise your brother," he announces before attacking the hapless Emsworth's paperwork with terrifying zeal. It's another sweetly funny episode in Guy Andrews's adaptations of the PG Wodehouse stories. Just think of it as The Idiot Downton Abbey, where absurd toffs get into muddles, usually with pigs and women.

Emsworth's impecunious rooster-haired buffoon of a son, Freddie (smashing Jack Farthing), has once again lost his allowance, this time in a doomed wager with fellow Drones Club member Catsmeat Potter Pirbright. After eating dog biscuits to impress a girl, Freddie decides to make his fortune selling canine nibbles. Biffing!

With a cast including Timothy Spall, Jennifer Saunders and Robert Bathhurst, BBC1's new Sunday-night PG Wodehouse adaptation Blandings could not have failed to have its moments. Sadly, for some reason, I could not shake the suspicion that it was probably a lot more fun to make than it was to watch.

Top marks to Spall though. His channelling of Boris Johnson for his portrayal of Lord Emsworth was worth the entrance fee alone.

Blandings is based in part on the rather funny PG Wodehouse novels and stars Jennifer Saunders, Mark Williams and Timothy Spall. Now, the books themselves aren't exactly hard-hitting bits of realism, but there's nothing worse than a comedy in which everyone involved (with the exception of the above-mentioned) is grinning and acting like idiots because they know the whole thing is silly. So I gave up after 10 minutes. Absolutely horrendous and twee.

Fast, silly and lighter than a hummingbird's feather, this all-star PG Wodehouse adaptation is a dose of unashamed fun. Timothy Spall might perhaps be channelling Boris Johnson in his turn as Lord Emsworth, the mumbling patriarch of a mad family who's forever failing to avoid the wrath of Jennifer Saunders. Most of the magic of Wodehouse's writing nearly always gets lost of the way to the screen, but if even a portion of it sticks you've got an enjoyable, cartoonish caper. That's the case here.

The last time PG Wodehouse was a hit on the small screen was a good couple of decades back when Fry and Laurie slipped into the apparel of Jeeves and Wooster. Bally good fun it was too. Since then, the frightful cads and dishy heiresses of Wodehouse's world have had to carry on flapping in print. Here, however, comes Blandings, adapted from Wodehouse's series of rural capers set in prelapsarian Shropshire.

Rather than lavish oodles of budget on a spiffing primetime rival to Downton, the BBC have sensibly positioned Blandings as a Sunday early evening entertainment for all the family. From the moment the Empress, Lord Emsworth's prizewinningly sizeable pig, unleashes her first flatulent fanfare, the scheduling looks (and sounds) vindicated. Cast as his Lordship is Timothy Spall, suggesting just a whiff of the maxim that all pigs look like their owners. As Connie, his termagant of a sister, Jennifer Saunders often threatens to harrumph off to her room if she doesn't get her way. Deprived of the jaunty, silken music of Wodehouse's prose, we are yet to find out why this dire warning is quite such a bad thing.

With Lost in Austen, Guy Andrews has already proved a dab hand at paying tribute to much loved literature while luring it towards the present day. Sometimes here he meddles a little too assertively. When Freddy Emsworth (Jack Farthing) was busy getting the Old Bill drunk in order to break ex-cowboy Jimmy (James Norton) out of jug, pleasing strains of rag and Charleston made way for anachronistic boogie-woogie. Meanwhile some jokes are going to sail over the heads of a younger audience. Freddy alluded - a touch too louchely for teatime - to the Pink Pussy Club. And nowadays not everyone is going to laugh at this one: "Harrow? Yes I guessed he'd known corruption in his youth." But it's fun and doesn't think the world of itself.

To grasp the genius of PG Wodehouse, read him

The great writer's gifts do not translate to the screen, so Blandings was bound to fail.