Stream On: the battle of the British costume … dramas?, part three—‘Blandings’
The winner? ‘Blandings,’ from P.G. Wodehouse’s series of comic stories, may be the antidote to ‘Downton Abbey.’
The great English humorist P.G. Wodehouse wrote several series: Jeeves and Wooster, The Drones Club, the Golf series, etc.—including, over the span of fourteen books, the Blandings Castle stories. In 1967 Sir Ralph Richardson and Stanley Holloway starred in a BBC miniseries, Blandings Castle, unfortunately lost to history. But thankfully, in 2013 and 2014, Mammoth Screen productions filmed 13 new hilarious episodes of Blandings for the BBC.
/Amazon /Streaming /⭐7.1/10 /Trailer /2013-2014 /NR
Clarence Threepwood, 9th Earl Emsworth, commonly known as Lord Emsworth (Timothy Spall), “that amiable and boneheaded peer,” is the absent-minded head of the large Threepwood family. Longing for nothing more than talking to his prize pig, the gigantic Empress of Blandings, or putter peacefully in the idyllic gardens of Blandings Castle, he must frequently face the unpleasant reality of his domineering sister (Jennifer Saunders) and familial duties.
The Empress of Blandings is the eminence porcine that rules over the castle—well, rules over Clarence. His favorite (possibly his only) book, which he might be reading, carrying around or looking for, is Whiffle’s On The Care of the Pig (which seems to have been brought into actual existence by a Wodehouse fan).
The Empress was played by a late sow whose stage-name was also ‘The Empress.’ She passed away after filming completed, apparently of a massive heart attack. According to Spall, “She was by far the most flatulent member of the cast and believe me, she had a lot of competition.”
All of the episodes were based on various Blandings Castle stories, and follow them closely and humorously. The main weakness, as it was with every Wodehouse film adaptation, was the loss of Wodehouse’s narrative voice. “And the sun shone serenely down—on, as we say, the lawns, the battlements, the trees, the bees, the best type of bird and the rolling parkland” etc.
This is compensated for, rather effectively, by the accretion of the cartoonish elements of Blandings. Gardener Angus McAllister (Ron Donachie) is a Scot with an incomprehensible brogue who could be seen from space, from his ginger curls spilling out of a tweed bucket hat down to his kilt. Freddie Threepwood (Jack Farthing), Lord Emsworth’s second son, a simple-minded youth, sports a pompadour that rises up when he’s excited; and the eccentric Lord Emsworth himself generally looks as if he dressed in the dark during a house fire. (Jennifer Saunders has said that Blandings is still more realistic than Downton Abbey. New Yorker contributor Jody Rosen wrote that it’s Downton Abbey’s “antidote.”) The 1930’s setting, with terrific period details of wardrobe, furnishings and automobiles adds to the considerable fun.
And of course there’s the characters’ rich dialogue, which is true to the books, further ameliorating the narrative problem. “I did not creep. I manifested silently” (Beach, the Butler, in “Crime Wave at Blandings.”)
Beach, that eccentric butler, is played joyously in season one by Mark Williams. In season two Beach is played very nicely indeed by Tim Vine (who separately held, from 2004–2014, the Guinness World Record for most jokes told in an hour—499. Each one had to get a laugh); presumably Williams had gone off to play Father Brown, a very different turn.
Blandings is a ton of fun; one of the most entertaining Wodehouse adaptations I’ve seen, with the proviso that his books really can’t be approached on the same level; they are a different animal indeed. For them, I’ll suggest Hoopla (in Dare County) or Kanopy, the library apps.
Sources include Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0 DEED).
Pete Hummers is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to earn fees by linking Amazon.com and affiliate sites. This adds nothing to Amazon's prices. This column originally appeared on The Outer Banks Voice.