Blandings

Blandings, TV review

Blandings is a lot of fun. Harry Enfield doing his Cholmondley-Warner on steroids was just one of the several guest stars we're promised.

With Blandings principally consisting of posh people strolling about being aristocratically bonkers, these adaptations of PG Wodehouse are like watching an episode of Downton where everyone has been on the gin all night. Which actually makes it rather more entertaining.

Helped no end by guest casting that included Mathew Baynton (The Wrong Mans) and Geoffrey McGivern (This Is Jinsy), the story of Throwing Eggs pretty much began and ended with the title. But it worked a treat.

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.

Blandings, series 2, episode 1 review

Harry Enfield was deliciously obnoxious as Dunstable. Throwing tantrums, eggs and insults ("Stop that whistling you disgusting Scotch peasant!") with red-faced regularity, his slapstick was so effective it was like he'd taken the pressure off the rest of the cast to make fools of themselves.

Stars pay tribute to The Empress after she dies

Stars of the BBC comedy drama Blandings have been paying tribute to the programme's pig star, The Empress, who has died.

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.