Blandings

Saunders is always a fave but her lines omg. Her threats and superficial social climbing and Farthing and Spall are spot in. Poor put upon Butler Beach is such a great foil. Wow I laughed out loud a lot. Enjoy. Downtown Abbey gone off the rails.

I had high hopes for Blandings based on Jennifer Saunders' involvement. While she is quite good, the whole cast of regulars is excellent.

Unfortunately the first couple of episodes were just so-so and may have put off some reviewers who were in a rush to judgment when writing up their overly critical posts here. And there are a few occasional characters, like Baxter, who seem to not be quite on a par with the others, but their short-comings are more pronounced because the rest of the cast/characters are so excellent.

By the third and fourth episodes, the actors seem to have found their pace and settled very well into their characters. Timothy Spall is fantastic. Freddie, Beach, the maniacal gardener ... all of them are great in their roles and are laugh-out-loud funny.

Yes it is silly and yes it is quite different from the earlier Wodehouse inspired productions. If you want to see Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry playing Bertie and Jeeves, then this is not a rehash of the slower paced, repetitive, 1950's, I Love Lucy style Wodehouse that they did so well. If that's your cuppa' ... and I enjoyed that series too ... then by all means watch them. Comparing the two serves no useful purpose.

I've been reading Wodehouse pretty much all my life. I love the lightness, the frothy confusion and the way he wove the characters into living, breathing people on the page. And as such, I approached the arrival of 'Blandings' with a mix of excitement and fear. Fear, because it's notoriously difficult to get Wodehouse from the page to the screen.

The first episode seemed to reinforce all those fears, presenting me with a show that bore little resemblance to those 'living breathing people' that my long association with Wodehouse had let loose inside my head. However, things were to change, and for the better....

Fry and Laurie's approach back in the 90s with Jeeves and Wooster was to throw every line out with gusto, and hope that, on occasion, some of them hit the mark. By and large they succeeded. This wasn't the approach with Blandings.

With Blandings, it's very much the character interaction that drives the show, and so it was as much the delivery as the dialogue that was going to make or break the show. And in the beginning, things looked bleak. However, as the series progressed, I did find myself warming more to the actors. Tim Spall plays Emsworth with a mix of muddle-headedness and down-trodden persecution, constantly trying to squirm out from under the thumb of Jennifer Saunders' Lady Constance. Mark Williams performance as Beach was surprisingly good, especially as Beach is described as 'stately' in the novels, and one thing that Williams isn't, is stately. Jack Farthing is air-headed, frivolous and spend-thrift as Freddie, and swings from annoying to endearing.

The other characters go a long way to supporting the main cast, especially Cyril Wellbeloved, Angus McAllister, and the slimy Baxter. There's also a stream of female visitors, some of which could grace my table anytime. Pandora and Monica Simmons were especially striking.

The dialogue was, on occasion, very good indeed, and strangely in keeping with what Wodehouse may have written, were he sitting down today to write Blandings for the first time.

Now the series has ended, I'm left hoping for a second to be commissioned, and will no doubt be paying for the DVD - and this is something I never thought I would be saying after the first episode.

I bought the series on DVD here in Belgium. As Board Member of the Belgium Wodehouse Club, I must say that I can appreciate every attempt to put the work of Wodehouse in the spotlights. Apart from the color of The Empress, I love the show and I hope that there will be more series in the pipeline! The actors are well chosen. The pig steels the show every week! I love Freddy Threepwood and I copied his hairstyle immediately! Aunt Constance is phenomenal in using her eyebrows! Wodehouse is an author that we may not forget! Every television show can help to turn the attention on his works. I am waiting for a television series about Ukridge! Or other characters out of the works of Pelham Granville Wodehouse. The settings in "Blandings" are phenomenal! I am very sorry for the tree that was chosen as brakes for the car of Freddy! I understand that the actor who plays beach will be replaced by an other actor. I am sorry for that!

I don't care about comparing or contrasting this series with literary masterpieces. I care about how enjoyable it is to watch character actors do their thing. And these actors do not disappoint. Their presentations are so well done and so well matched it gives me great pleasure to watch nostalgically the antics of the British upper crust makes a consistent dash toward lunacy in logic as they refuse to face reality during the great Victorian Age which in truth mimics some of the sexual innuendo to be found here. I hope the series gets the chance to find its feet. This show is an intellectual delight, especially if one enjoys the poetics of words, the sounds they make, and the sub-textual meanings behind them in a given context. The writers must have enjoyed themselves immensely while struggling to put the strings of expressions together to help develop the characters and their relationships to one another. "Lmao", in a dignified manner, of course.