Blandings

Timothy Spall on Blandings

"It was like drinking a beautiful, nourishing soup - the cleverness of his language, the idiosyncratic form it takes"

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.

First Night: Blandings, BBC1

Somebody had at one point mixed in a cartoonish comedy sound effect to underline a joke - as if Wodehouse's comedy is a comic-strip affair, rather than a lovely collision of the highest style with the emptiest content. As television it wasn't bad at all. As Wodehouse, it wasn't quite good enough.

Blandings: episode one review

The lively chat could not save what was ultimately an arch and rather empty effort. Never were you drawn into the world of Blandings and never did you get a sense of the precise and comic world which Wodehouse created.

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.

Blandings is just the ticket, by jove

BBC1's new Wodehouse adaptation is a trouser dropping farce of the old school.

Blandings = Downton with less grandeur and more farce

As we reported back in February of last year, a bit of PG Wodehouse brilliance is coming your way as Blandings premieres tomorrow on BBC One at 1830. For those that feel Downton Abbey has a bit too much grandeur for its own good and needs a bit of farce (or more than it already has in some people's minds, anyway) then Blandings is well worth your telly time this Sunday.

The balm of Blandings

PG Wodehouse's gentle unravelling of upper-class twerpery offers us refuge from our own rage. But was he a class warrior?

Will PG Wodehouse's Blandings work on TV?

Not since Ralph Richardson in 1967 have Lord Emsworth and his beloved pig graced our screens. But can the BBC faithfully capture PG Wodehouse's comic prose in new series Blandings.