Timothy Spall

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.

Blandings is a new comedy series adapted from a collection of novels by P.G. Wodehouse, but it's already attracted a wide range of criticism. Much of the vitriol targets the show's family-friendly, 6.30pm slot on a Sunday evening, but there's also criticism from die-hard Wodehouse fans who believe that any adaptation of his work is sacrilege. Hey ho.

The series follows the residents of Blandings Castle; Clarence (Timothy Spall), who just wants a quiet life - and to spend time with his beloved pig, the Empress; his sister Connie (Jennifer Saunders), who constantly interfering with other people's business; and Clarence's loyal butler Beach (Mark Williams) - all of whom are pestered by visits from Clarence's idiotic son Freddie (Jack Farthing). In the opening episode, Clarence tries to enter the Empress into a fattest-pig contest, but his pig man is put in jail by his main rival.

The first thing that came to me when watching Blandings is that Spall can play a toff better than I thought. His performance as Clarence was great, as is his delivery of Wodehouse's lines, like when he demonstrates how persuasive his late wife was: "She once put forth such a forceful case for beetroot I actually put some in my mouth."

I was a bit annoyed by the gimmicky use of comic sound effects, whether it be with Freddie's terrible driving or Connie's stormy demands. You can try to ignore it, but it gets a bit tedious after a while.

On the whole though, Blandings is an entertaining half-hour and a decent way to pass the time - although I still expect a few comments from fans trying to push his books into my hands.

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.

Blandings first episode threw up nothing more distressing than the sight of Lord Emsworth's pig man dancing on a pub table in a state of drunken dishevelment. His lordship's hog, the Empress, responded to her beloved handler's subsequent incarceration by going on hunger strike, seriously jeopardising her chances in the forthcoming fattest pig competition at the county fair.

And the silliness didn't stop there, with love-struck nieces, unwelcome suitors, silly-arse sons, mendacious magistrates, fierce aunts and resourceful butlers all thrown into the mix.

Timothy Spall stars as the blustering Lord Emsworth, with Jennifer Saunders as his indomitable sister Connie, and Jack Farthing - in scene-stealing form - as his son and heir Freddie.

Personally, I don't think Wodehouse transfers to the screen - his genius for imagery and turn of phrase inevitably gets left on the page - but Blandings' combination of period detail, star turns and amiable imbecility filled half an hour entertainingly enough for me. This view wasn't unanimously held in my household, however, where Wodehouse's inter-war world of opulence and privilege proved totally alien, largely incomprehensible and relentlessly unfunny to my ten year-old daughter.

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.

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.