Timothy Spall

If real on-screen charm was enough to make an entertaining crime caper then there's no doubt that Pierce Brosnan and Emma Thompson have it in spades.

Attractive French locations add a pleasant background for an undernourished script that finds Brosnan and his ex-wife Thompson joining forces to steal a precious diamond from the businessman crook who has left them flat broke.

Brosnan and Thompson, and Timothy Spall and Celia Imrie as their happy go-lucky-accomplices all give writer-director John Hopkins much more than he deserves but in the end they, and the audience, are let down.

The Love Punch is a British farce starring Pierce Brosnan, Emma Thompson, Celia Imrie and Timothy Spall, four cheerful Garden of England pensioners (Emma? You're only 55!) stealing a diamond necklace in the south of France in order to haul themselves out of impending penury. With its extreme mugging, it will feel either insultingly ridiculous or a simple amusement depending on how drunk you are.

Cinema can be perfunctory on the theme of love at the best of times, but Brosnan and Thompson play out their romance as though it were a game of charades. If they were wearing feather boas they would be winking over them until their eyelids dislocated, having the time of their lives in a champagne-and-trifle dreamworld while we loll, longing for literally anything else. A movie about Stalin? The Foreign Legion? Donald Duck?

Q&A: Timothy Spall

The worst thing anyone's said to me? 'Sorry old boy, but you've got leukaemia'

Blandings review

Timothy Spall makes a brilliant and utterly convincing crumbling aristocrat.

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.

Jessica Hynes guest stars as the impecunious and frightfully rude Lady Littlewood, who turns up at Blandings with her obnoxious son. She is in dire need of a rich husband so she fixes her beady eye on half-witted Lord Emsworth (Timothy Spall). He's far from being marriage material; apart from being a pig-obsessed idiot, he can't even remember her name.

It's the last in the comedy drama series that hasn't gone down well with Wodehouse fans. Still, with audiences of more than four million, Blandings obviously meets a need for some early-evening Sunday silliness.

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.