PG Wodehouse

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.

Tom Sharpe on PG Wodehouse

On the eve of a new six-part adaptation of the Blandings stories by BBC One, author Tom Sharpe tells of his love for the stories of PG Wodehouse.

PG Wodehouse feels like one of the less frequently adapted British literary totems. On one hand, it's surprising, given that his light, deft comedy seems perfect for TV formats. But set against that is Wodehouse's remarkable facility for language - it takes an intrepid writer to attempt to do him justice, and quite a cast too. This, the first TV Wodehouse since Fry & Laurie's 1990s adventures, is underpinned by Timothy Spall's gleeful portrayal of the amiable but befuddled Lord Emsworth, and promises tales of various misadventures involving underfattened pigs, unsuitable suitors and ineffectual fops. It's minor fare but the jauntily affectionate silliness might just get you in the end. Anyone disenchanted by the will-this-do? cynicism of the Downton Christmas special could do worse than give this a go.

Like all PG Wodehouse adaptations, this suffers from the inevitable fact that it can never be as funny as the original, where the humour is not particularly in the ludicrous situations - here devoted pig owner Lord Emsworth strives to help the Empress win the Fattest Pig Contest despite the untimely imprisonment of her keeper. It's the way they're told: sheer effervescent clever wordplay, bubbling along at the perfect pace, with eccentric metaphors and slang words which jump off the page to charm away any reservations (that unfortunate Nazi collaboration business, or the fact they all basically tell the same story over 
and over).

Scriptwriters do try, forcing the best lines in there somehow, but even actors with the skill of Timothy Spall and Robert Bathurst can't make them sound as funny as they read. Spall looks exactly right as the lugubrious, befuddled Emsworth though, with Jennifer Saunders as his bossy sister (straying slightly too far into spoofing it up) and newcomer Jack Farthing as his cheerfully idiotic son. Frothy nonsense is hard to bring off and though I rarely laughed, it is an amiable and harmless distraction from a cold, broke January.