Blandings

It’s my belief that PG Wodehouse was the finest writer of prose ever to have lived. His words dance off the page into the reader’s imagination, there to fizz around like the bubbles in fine champagne. It has to be conceded, though, that his actual plots are generally rather slight affairs. That represents a challenge to writers adapting the Master’s work for the screen. Lose Wodehouse’s majestic language and you’re left with little more than a parade of tipsy baronets getting into scrapes.

I’m very pleased to tell you that Guy Andrews, the writer behind the BBC’s new series of Lord Emsworth stories, has done the near-impossible. Blandings, beginning its six-episode run this Sunday evening at 6.30pm, is really rather splendid. The casting helps. I wouldn’t have seen Timothy Spall as the obvious casting for rangy aristocrat Lord Emsworth, but he is a revelation in the role. He is precisely dotty enough, but combines the dottiness with a deceptively magisterial bearing.

Jennifer Saunders, as his formidable sister Connie, is something of a marvel as well. Despite a rather ill-considered turn in the hairdressing department, Jack Farthing is a thoroughly likeable Freddie Threepwood, too.

The early-evening scheduling means it’s the ideal gateway into the world of Wodehouse for younger viewers. One hopes that they will, in due course, develop a taste for the heady cocktail of classical allusion and freewheeling daftness of the books themselves.

This first episode is a simplified retelling of ‘Pig-hoo-oo-o-ey’ from the 1935 collection Blandings Castle And Elsewhere. If you enjoy it, and there is no reason why you shouldn’t, I’d urge you to seek out the books with all decent haste.

Another series of well-loved classic books springs on to our television screens this week. Strangely though, this interpretation of GK Chesterton’s Father Brown series is tucked away on Monday afternoons.

It feels for all the world like a cosy Sunday afternoon whodunnit. What it’s doing there just after lunchtime on a Monday is a mystery in itself. Former Fast Show star Mark Williams, who also appears in Blandings as Beach, Lord Emsworth’s butler, is the titular cleric in this latest adaptation. Set in a soothingly nostalgic post-war period of vintage cars and New-Look frocks, Father Brown’s one of those ‘Select the murderer from a range of suspects’ countryhouse detective yarns that isn’t going to win any prizes for originality. It might win a few prizes for ‘Show most conducive to a post-lunch snooze’, though. If only the BBC would air it on the right day.

Father Brown is an amiable enough bit of telly that’s not exactly unmissable, but jolly enough to keep you company while you’re doing a crossword, or writing some egregiously overdue thank-you notes.

Blandings, though, if you don’t watch that, I fear we can no longer be friends.