User reviews

I'm clearly much more easily pleased than some of my fellow reviewers, because I *love* this production. The cast is wonderful - Timothy Spall is toweringly magnificent as Lord Emsworth (though we did wonder why they tidied him up so much in Series 2?), Jennifer Saunders is very fine as the glowering Connie ("Im going .. to my room!"), the terrific Jack Farthing pretty nearly steals the show as the eternally daffy Freddie, Julian Rhind-Tutt is great as as the rakish Galahad, and Robert Bathurst provides sterling support as Emsworth's nemesis, "Stinker" Parsloe ... and of course, The Empress is gorgeous. I admit I haven't read the Blandings books yet, but I've seen many previous Wodehouse adaptations, and the tone of this series seems spot-on to me, without being slavishly intent on capturing every tiny nuance and detail of the original stories. And of course the sumptuous Irish locations are splendid. The only slight disappointment for me was the loss of the wonderful Mark Williams after Series One ... Tim Vine does a good job in Series Two, but Williams was so utterly *perfect* as the bibulous Beach that some slight disappointment is inevitable, and Tim perhaps played him a little too 'straight' ... but hey, it's a very minor quibble. I think you'd have to be an inflexible Wodehouse purist, or just a very hard-hearted viewer, not to find a great deal to enjoy in the delightful series - well-played, well-written, well-made. My family and I loved it unabashedly and wanted to watch it all over again as soon as it was finished. Pure delight.

Perhaps because I'm American, I can't help but think how ungrateful the UK reviewers are here. You want to watch dreadful comedy? Watch any US network on any night on our side of the lake. I love PG Wodehouse...he is criminally unread here in the States. And, having loved Jeeves and Wooster and all it's charm (Laurie and Fry)...I'm thrilled for this adaptation. I think the actors (and casting) are great. The writing is sharp. It is a little disheveled aesthetically, but I think it works here.

I'm looking forward to the rest of this and frankly if viewers in the UK don't want it...please send it (and company) over to us and take back Downton Drabby.

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.

We should not, I think, judge Blandings by the standards of realistic contemporary comedy. I agree that characters do not seem realistic in some respects and that the acting and effects in Season 1 are more artificially (Freddy's forelock rising and falling at the sight of a pretty female, for example), but both seasons have grown on me--I like them both. Both butlers Beach are wonderful, each in his own way. But both seasons are based on Wodehouse's brilliantly comedic language and absurd plots and unforgettably archetypal characters--plagues in the form of aunts/sisters, guardian-crossed lovers, butlers with more sense than their employers, frivolous young men who live for nightlife and fall in love with a succession of pretty young women, and leading male characters of the upper class who have a hobby-horse (in this case, the Empress) and are one cartload shy of a full load of fertilizer. I only wish there were 10 seasons of this delightful fluff.

When the brilliant and inspired Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie did PG Wodehouse's "Jeeves & Wooster" in the 1990's it was a pure joy. Because they didn't appear to be acting. They seemed to somehow miraculously become those two characters. You couldn't see the strings.

The complete opposite is true of the BBC's new six-part adaptation of PG Wodehouse's Blandings Castle stories. As Lord Emsworth, Timothy Spall does little but put on a posh voice and dig in, like a knackered old repertory company actor playing Toad of Toad Hall for the umpteenth time, in yet another tatty production of Wind in the Willows.

As Emsworth's sister Connie, Jennifer Saunders looks equally bored and uninterested, as if she's hurriedly learned the lines for a quickie PG Wodehouse sketch in an episode of French & Saunders.

Worst of all is Jack Farthing as the idiot son Freddie. His upper class accent is about as convincing as a first year American drama student auditioning to play all the Hugh Laurie parts in a bad remake of Blackadder.

Farthing's on-screen strategy appears to be to pull as many stupid grimaces as possible, bump into the furniture, fall over, and hope for the best.

The only member of the company who isn't dismally miscast is Mark Williams, who's Beach the Butler is neatly underplayed, nicely observed, and completely believable – standing head and shoulders above the surrounding gaggle of tiresome, stereotyped, phone-it-in actors.

The pig is good. Very good. His flat, upturned nose can't help but put me in mind of Kevin Bacon (No pun intended. A genuine, physical similarity that is undoubtedly worth pointing out.) Blandings' early evening, weekend time slot makes me wonder just exactly who the target audience are intended to be. The poor slapstick and semi-Pantomine style appear to be aimed at a younger audience. Chuckle Brothers meets Downton Abbey? Yet that age group's unfamiliarity with the Wodehouse genre would surely only lead to utter confusion and bewilderment. I know Wodehouse pretty well and it left me cold.

The only thing that made me laugh during the whole of the first two episodes was the thought of a couple of streetwise urban teenagers accidentally switching on to Blandings and fruitlessly trying to work out who these people were, and what the hell they were all on about. I will not be returning a third time to this particular crumbling pile.

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I will easily fly in the face of recent opinion on this show. If you want Jeeves and Wooster, then just watch your old DVD:s. I'm sure the ambition was to make this series as funny, but even if it can't quite reach up to that level, it's still good quality entertainment.

We have great actors, relaxed performances, fun guests - and a huge fat pig:) Pretty happy right there:)

I'm not a Wodehouse purist or expert, but I still have a feeling he would have appreciated the efforts to make his writings worth checking out for a new generation. Give it it a shot, and don't be so jeevesed off!

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.

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!

Pelham Grenville Wodehouse must be turning in his grave. I've read all the Blandings novels and they are amongst the wittiest that PG ever wrote, and I have been longing for a TV version.

This series however loses all the wit and subtlety of the author and turns Blandings and its characters into something straight out of burlesque. The only ones which have some sort of resemblance to the originals are Beach and the pig. The acting, if it can be called such, is dreadful, but I'd blame the director rather than the actors. They've obviously been given instructions to be unbelievable.

I'll probably watch the rest of the series as I'm such a sucker for the writings of PG, but I would hope any further series would be put either in the PG mode rather than follow the imagination of the director as to what he/she thinks PG should have written, or else shelved forever....or at least until someone else can figure out how to do it properly. Reading the novels might help.

For per light-hearted entertainment, Blandings fits the bill. Just good old fashioned humour with lots of silliness and not offensive to anyone. Many have said it is not as good as Jeeves and Wooster, I would disagree. It is just different, you can watch without having to think too hard as the plot lines are beautiful simple with fun endings. The programmes have been updated and are not as good as the books, but that equally applies to Jeeves and Wooster. Jennifer Saunders as Connie is superb, but then so is the rest of the cast even with a change of Beach the Butler. My only wish is that more series had been films as the books are so good. had been filmed.

More fun for the actors, one suspects, than the audience, this is yet another dramatisation of the comic works of P J Woodhouse. Unquestionably however, Woodhouse is more enjoyable on the printed page than on the small screen, a viewpoint vindicated here. The adaptor of the work just can't resist inserting some modern piece of vulgarity into the dialogue which is wholly at odds with the innocence and playfulness of the source material. The acting is inconsistent, Jennifer Saunders in particular seems badly miscast and over made-up as the tyrannical sister while Timothy Spall fails to convince he's of titled stock at all and thus misses out on the buffoonery of his Lordship's character. Of the supporting characters, actors like Mark Williams and David Walliams are just too familiar to engage, never mind surprise, in their characterisations. The humour seems to come through despite instead of because of the playing and one can't help but think this series just looks like an excuse for established actors to camp or ham (or both) it up, in funny period clothes and frightfully put-on upper-class accents.

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.

A little gem of a comedy, with a host of crackingly good actors having lots of fun in comic-book style capers. The story lines are daft, and the script is witty - peppered with some splendid one liners, which exploit the breadth of out wonderful language. Mark Williams and Timothy Spall make a great double act, but the star of the show for me has to be Jack Farthing - who has fallen on his feet amongst such an array of British talent - playing an excellent turn as the absent-minded yet hugely likable Freddie Threepwood. His lop-sided expressions (verbally as well as facially) are top hole. Overall, an enjoyable dollop of good innocent fun - highly recommended :-)

This series has no redeeming merits whatsoever. It seems as if the screenwriter just read a brief summary of the books, and not the books themselves.

There are so many things wrong, it's hard to know where to start. Clarence is tall and thin. Tim Spall is not.

There are additional, and wholly spurious, story lines.

The subtleties of the original have been thrown to the winds.

If you have an hour to spare, don't watch an episode of this awful travesty. Read one of the stories. I guarantee you will laugh and will consider it time well spent.

Having read numerous poor reviews I did not have high hopes for Blandings but I never the less watched the first two episodes on BBC Iplayer and found that far from my negative expectations I was thoroughly enjoying it! The cast is especially well chosen with Timothy Spail particularly suited to his role.A comedy based in a large country manor is hard to come by, as is might I add an enjoyable, light hearted and simply fun comedy with a relative innocence about it! The cast seem at home in their roles and this too is rare so early on in a series. Overall I must dispel the doubters and implore you to give it a go and don't watch it with expectations, rather sit back and allow the genius of Wodehouse to flow forth.

First episode - OK-ish. The plot of the story was a little mangled, but something of the original Wodehouse humour survived.

Second episode - utterly dreadful. All pretence to be an adaptation of Wodehouse was abandoned, with only the names of the characters remaining. Instead we had a completely new, thoroughly half-baked plot, written by a script writer who never grew out of scatological humour (something Wodehouse never, ever stooped to). A terrible waste - the cast could have delivered a good result given a decent screenplay, but really struggled with this drivel.

Wodehouse is widely recognised as being the master of the complex comic plot. It's incredibly arrogant of screenwriters to say, "Ah yes, but obviously I can do a lot better."

Additional note - dipped back into the series for episode 4 - "The Crime Wave at Blandings". The original short story is arguably one of the best, if not actually the best comic short story ever written in the English language. Anyone who hasn't read it should immediately go and read several Blandings stories first (in order to get familiar with the characters) and then read TCWaB. The dramatisation of it in this series was beneath contempt. Absolutely everything which makes the story good was lost and replaced by dross instead.

Incidentally, TCWaB is the only time when Emsworth is recorded as actually visiting Beach's pantry. Gally was regularly to be found supping port with Beach, but not Emsworth. This series has him popping in and out every two minutes.

This series took a little getting used to. Third time watching, my husband and I caught on-- so many verbal and visual nuances to appreciate! Timothy Spall is brilliant. Best thing Jennifer Saunders has done. Jack Farthing is perfect, just the right degree of campy exaggeration, camera, music, performance. Only weakness is it's rather the same plot repeated, but who cares? There needs be a framework for the players to hang their magic on. I predict this will become a classic and cultists bewailing its all-too-limited span.

I've never read Wodehouse, however after watching this, I will certainly start reading the stories.

I like the performances of all the cast; they seem to have a great affection for the source material. I think Timothy Spall and Jennifer Saunders are perfectly cast and have great chemistry. Jack Farthing really shines in his role of Freddy, really inhabiting the character and period.

And Mark Williams is great, very watchable even when he has no dialogue, reacting to the surrounding chaos. Beach and Clarence Threepwood are a great double act. Capital !

and so I can enjoy even a distressed imitation of a Wodehouse work if it includes a good cast, adequate sets and settings and some recognizable associations with the original. Well, I can enjoy it if I have not read Wodehouse recently, so that the comparison is not acutely felt.

The usual complaints, spattered throughout the reviews here like the results of sneezes or holy water sprinkles, depending on your mind, are:

1. It's not a fair copy.

No, it's not. The show demonstrates the difference between burlesque and farce. I have to take the episodes on their own merits in order to enjoy rather than suffer them. Anyone who has attempted to watch any Shakespeare film ever made is familiar with the rigors required. However, the result is that I smiled at much of what I saw and heard.

2. The earl and Lady Keeble do not evidence the manner of the manor.

No, they do not. Some charm is missed in the characters lacking THAT demeanor. I would have enjoyed a more committed attempt towards the exquisite hauteur of the country nobility, the complacent superiority infused with the scent of manure. But at a time when even the actual country nobility cannot manage the pose, is it reasonable to demand it of mere actors? And Jack Farthing's Freddie does hit some good notes as a more urban variety of the posh fool.

3. Not only are the episodes not Wodehouse, they're NOT Wodehouse.

No, they are not and the others are NOT. One must accept the episodes on their own terms or one must do something else rather than watch them. Such as reading Wodehouse and not imagining other situations into which the characters might have wandered.

4. The humor (Excuse me. Humour.) is too coarse.

Yes, it is. The point here is that country life does not find anything especially funny in excrement and digestive noises. They are a part of life. I tolerated the contemporary lowness of the jokes because I live in a country where presidential candidates disparage the size of their competitors' genitals. A mere fart joke is something I can tolerate, the way I tolerate the real thing occurring in my presence.

5. It's not Wodehouse.

No, it's not. We've covered that. And, you see, that is the principal complaint and the one reviewers keep returning to, like people whose minds have been branded by trauma and the loops of PTSD keep them reliving it. I have been lucky enough not to be branded in this way, and so I have enjoyed the show for what it is - a silly, well-made, well-acted, loose and slapdash farcical turn on rural ways in a farcical British past that may for some bear a resemblance to P.G. Wodehouse works. This resemblance could cause pain for those who notice it.

When such discomfort occasionally rises in me, I try to concentrate on something else. Such as the question of whether Mr. Small intentionally avoided dental and orthodontic care throughout his life for the sake of his craft, or he just didn't get around to it. That gets me through the pangs of disappointment.

Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse isn't the easiest writer to adapt for television, granted - still, one wouldn't have expected the BBC, even in its present degraded state, to have authorised so abominable a travesty as this. Mr. Guy Andrews, the so-called writer responsible for these versions, has helpfully added a note to the IMDb's entry so that new potential viewers may at least have some warning of the devastation he has wrought. His characterisation of Blandings Castle as "Dysfunction Junction" should have been warning enough to anyone who has actually read the original stories; he is clearly unfamiliar with Evelyn Waugh's far more accurate summing-up. Waugh said that the gardens of Blandings Castle were "that garden from which we are forever exiled", and the sheer sweetness of Wodehouse's vision is clearly incomprehensible to Andrews. It's not just that he changes the stories so much that they are almost unrecognisable, or even that his new material isn't in the least funny. It's the horrid coarsening of the tales that repels - in the second episode, we even get jokes (lots of them) about excrement, as if this were automatically hilarious. Sir Pelham would never have countenanced such horrors. Nor should we. Oh, and all the actors are either miscast or very bad (when they're not both), Baxter and Beach should swap costumes and the Empress of Blandings is the wrong colour.

Thoroughly enjoyed this. It's quite brave of the BBC to produce a series based on what some would call an outdated style of humour; not an indecent scene nor foul word in sight! Could this be any more different to Mrs Browns Boys? Incredibly, Browns Boy's scores more highly here at IMDb; that totally perplexes me. In my opinion, none of the principal roles are easy to play. The cast all take aim and have a very good shot. Occasionally the performances are priceless; there is some very skillful acting here. Sometimes something seems missing; perhaps a little more could have been extracted from the script. However, the sum is greater than the parts and the result is charming and funny. For those who criticise it as a poor reflection of Wodehouse's writings, I cannot comment as I have not read him. However, this series inspires me to do so and surely that is a great complement.

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.

Blandings is an adaptation of the comic works of P G Wodehouse. I have not read the books so will make no comparison to them. At a glance you have good cast with Jennifer Saunders, Mark Williams, Timothy Spall, David Walliams, Robert Bathurst.

However the first series was so uneven and below par that it was a miracle that a second series appeared and that was no better and might had been worse.

Anyhow Spall plays a buffoon like Lord of the castle with a fondness for The Empress his prize porker. Saunders is his overbearing sister, Jack Farthing plays his empty headed son who keeps crashing his car on the same spot with a fondness for the night club called The Pink Pussy.

The series actually varied from dull to atrocious. There was little that was funny, humorous but plenty that was execrating. I quickly tired of Freddy crashing the car in the same spot and sometimes the guest actors did not seem to pitch the performance right. In fact the humour was rather off target.

Just finished season 2... I loved every minute of every episode, although I thought season 2 even funnier than season 1. I like Jack Farthing in Poldark, and to see his other comedic side was perfect. I have not read the books, but will plan to. All of the characters are fantastically cast. I love silly humor. We will be watching these again, and again. Laugh out loud humor at its best.