PG Wodehouse

A castle, Empress the pig & a rather porky aristocrat

Timothy Spall goes posh in a new PG Wodehouse adaptation.

IoS PG Wodehouse quiz: You could just ask Jeeves!

Downton Abbey may have gone, but fear not! PG Wodehouse is back. As the BBC's Blandings hits our screens next Sunday, Matthew Bell tests your knowledge of this saga of toffs at play.

PG Wodehouse's Uncle Fred In The Springtime was as replete as Twelfth Night with characters busy at impersonation and improbable plots designed to deliver love. Each performance was a gem of eccentric humour including Alfred Molina as Fred, director Martin Jarvis as Lord Emsworth and Patricia Hodge as his sister, 'a fiend in human shape'. As the new Will.i.am on the block says every other minute on The Voice: "It's dope."

I struggled with Dirk Gently (Monday, BBC Four). It had nothing to do with Stephen Mangan's considerable comedic talents, still less with Darren Boyd who plays Macduff, the Dr Watson to Dirk's Holmes. It is more to do with my devotion to Douglas Adams, upon whose comic novel this series is based. Adams was never well served by TV or film adaptations of his work, even big budget ones such as the 2005 film of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. His books always worked much better as radio adaptations that could leave the listener's imagination to fill in the gaps (indeed the Radio 4 version of Hitchhiker's even managed to be better than the book).

Jeeves and Wooster was similarly hard to make work on screen. Though Fry and Laurie's version was as good as any TV adaptation could be, it tried to tell the story through dialogue alone, which merely drew attention to the silliness of the plots. In PG Wodehouse, as in Douglas Adams, 90 per cent of the pleasure is in the prose, the narration, the felicities of language.

Over the course of a novel, Adams could afford to be quite subtle about Dirk's big idea, that all things are fundamentally interconnected. A TV adaptation can't be, and, as it keeps labouring the point, you find yourself saying: "Yes, yes, I get it." Perhaps as the series develops they will tone down this side of things.

Finally, and this is an anoraky point, Mangan looks nothing like the Dirk of the novels. At Cambridge Dirk was "rounder than the average undergraduate and wore more hats", and in later life he becomes rounder still, and scruffier, and more chaotic. Mangan seems too neat, too thin, too orderly.

Blandings is coming!

The celebrated stories of PG Wodehouse will be coming to life on BBC One as Timothy Spall, Jennifer Saunders and Guy Andrews star in Blandings, a new comedy series based on Wodehouse's work.

PG Wodehouse's rollicking Summer Lightning arrived with a cast to die for, including Matt Lucas' turn as a portentous PI and Charles Dance as a wayward aristo, mouth stuffed as full of cake as his lordship's prize-winning pigs.

Lord Emsworth (Martin Jarvis) is getting Empress of Blandings, his prize pig, ready for the Shropshire Agricultural Show. He's worried about possible nobbling by rival breeder Sir Gregory Parsloe (Michael Jayston). Meanwhile scandal looms if Emsworth's brother Galahad (Charles Dance) publishes his memoirs so Parsloe hires private detective Percy Pilbeam (Matt Lucas) to nick the manuscript. And love, as ever in a PG Wodehouse comedy, is making life very complicated for the younger set. Dramatised in two star-studded episodes by Archie Scottney, made by glamorous independents Jarvis and Ayres Productions.

Marcus Brigstocke - Radio 4's adenoidal prince of light comedy - returns for a third series of this half-decent celebrity chat show, in which each guest is compelled to try five things they've never done before. (Actually it's the fourth series if you count last year's BBC Four TV version, but it seems the BBC has chosen to forget this ever happened.) This week's guest is Sanjeev Baskar, whose experiences include watching Sex and the City, reading PG Wodehouse and visiting a Pentecostal church on men-only night which, he says, was "like a really bad audition".