A 36-stone porker to rival the genius of Jeeves



The opening scene of BBC TV’s new drama series, Blandings, features two decidedly pink and porky performers. The first is a 36-stone pig, Empress, scoffing a mound of rotting vegetables in her sty and showing her appreciation by doing much trumpeting from her bottom.

The second — if he will forgive the rudeness — is that talented actor Timothy Spall. He is playing the ninth Earl of Emsworth and is admiring Empress with pleasure. The Earl has entered her for a Shropshire agricultural show, at which he hopes she will be fattest pig on parade — provided Empress is not sabotaged by his great rival.

Blandings is based on the stories of P G Wodehouse, perhaps the greatest English comic writer of the 20th century. The series stars Jennifer Saunders, Robert Bathurst, David Walliams and Alice Orr-Ewing.



BBC TV's new drama series, Blandings, is based on the stories of comic writer P G Wodehouse

There is just one small problem. The engagingly dotty Earl of Emsworth is normally understood to be a bald figure; so slender that in his frequent moments of uncertainty he sways (as Wodehouse puts it) ‘like a sapling in the breeze’.

Mr Spall not only has a head of thick, wodge-like hair. He is also chubby enough to push the Empress close in that competition at the Shropshire Show. Did no one tell the casting director?

Wodehouse is notoriously difficult to adapt for drama. Some of the greatest talents in theatre and film have tried and failed. Andrew Lloyd Webber and Julian (Downton Abbey) Fellowes have had a bash at Wodehouse. Both lost the battle.

Impressive: Although Timothy Spall doesn't physically match the story's description of his character, his quirky performance is spot on

Talented John Alderton and Pauline Collins were let down by grotty Seventies TV production values.

Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry’s TV series Jeeves And Wooster started reasonably well, but soon ran out of juice.

So can today’s BBC cut the bacon with Blandings?

The flatulence of the Empress may make faint hearts recoil. Mr Spall’s girth will certainly have the pedants reaching for their red pencils, and I could have done without the incessantly jaunty music.

But having watched the first episode last night, I am impressed. The Beeb could have a hit on its hands.

The show manages to get across the genial eccentricity of Wodehouse without overdoing the poshness, and some of the acting — particularly Mark Williams as tipsy butler Beach, a wonderful contrast to Downton’s Carson — is a delight.

The plot bowls along, but there is enough time for an affectionate picture of country life to develop.



And one of the prime contributors to that quirkiness is our plump friend Mr Spall. So maybe the casting director was right, after all.

But the true magic is, of course, down to one man: Pelham Grenville Wodehouse. Born in 1881, ‘Plum’ may officially have been a Victorian, but he would become a symbolic figure of Edwardian and Twenties England. To this day, his fans refer to him as the Master.

He loved golf and cricket and his plots often featured both, along with morning snifters, gentlemen’s clubs, walrus-fanged aunts, gallumphing pratfalls, treasonous coincidences, upturned garden rakes, shimmering valets and freckle-faced, salty-minded girls, who were arguably the precursors of John Betjeman’s tennis ace of a pin-up, Joan Hunter Dunn.

Salaried work occasionally rears its ugly head in Wodehouse, but it is something to be avoided.



Some complain his tales are escapist nonsense. Given that many of his best-sellers appeared around the time of World War I, is that so surprising?

The Master: While Wodehouse may be best known for the Jeeves books, many devotees harbour a secret preference for the Blandings stories

Britain wanted cheering up, and Wodehouse did just that. My grandfather read him in the trenches of the Western Front and was forever grateful to him for bringing comic relief to that living hell. While Wodehouse may be best known for the Jeeves books, many devotees harbour a secret preference for the Blandings stories.

They are set in Blandings Castle, seat of the Emsworths and scene of many a romantic scrape — as well as all that pig feeding.

All the great Wodehousian themes are here — not least his lack of respect for officialdom.

Magistrates, like totalitarian spinsters (played in Blandings by the so-soish Miss Saunders), are invariably tartars. Policemen are dullards whose helmets are ripe for pinching. Self-satisfaction is regarded with suspicion.

Blandings scriptwriter Guy Andrews says: ‘Snobbery and unkindness are always punished in Wodehouse. The stereotype view of his writing being snobbish is quite wrong.’

Devotion to pigs or newts (or, for that matter, pretty girls) is encouraged in Wodehouse, but other forms of fanaticism are mocked. It seems absurd today that Wodehouse was ever mistaken for a Nazi sympathiser — as he was after falling into German hands on the Continent during the war and naively agreeing to write some radio talks from captivity.

There was a lot of Adolf Hitler in ‘the efficient Baxter’, a nosy-parker secretary unwittingly employed by Lord Emsworth.

Baxter, with his discipline and moral rigour, is altogether too smug and zealous a figure to find approval with Wodehouse. Surely he would have thought the Fuhrer similarly ghastly.

My grandfather, who wrote a letter to The Times to defend Wodehouse during the war controversy, remained a fan for his whole life and passed on his enthusiasm to my father.

When feeling blue, I reach for Wodehouse. He got my wife through her post-natal glums. It seems only right that the BBC should put out some Wodehouse in early January — for many people it’s the most depressing time of the year.

The show manages to get across the genial eccentricity of Wodehouse without overdoing the poshness, and some of the acting - particularly Mark Williams as tipsy butler Beach (pictured) - is a delight

So why is Wodehouse so difficult for dramatists? Well, his humour lies in his crisp, surreal prose. How can you dramatise the description of Honoria Glossop (in Carry On, Jeeves) as ‘one of those robust, dynamic girls with the muscles of a welter-weight and a laugh like a squadron of cavalry charging over a tin bridge’. Brilliant.

But the comedy dances only on a printed page. A director or scriptwriter has to make it migrate to the small screen.

Take the lines from Summer Lightning: ‘ “Yes,” said Millicent, rather in the tone of voice which Schopenhauer would have used when announcing the discovery of a caterpillar in his salad.’ Or: ‘Slingsby loomed in the doorway, like a dignified cloudbank’ (from If I Were You).

Wodehouse’s secret ingredient is bathos — a sudden move from serious to humorous. For instance: ‘He looked haggard and careworn, like a Borgia who has suddenly remembered that he has forgotten to put cyanide in the consomme, and the dinner gong due any minute.’ It works in print. But on screen?

Having watched the first episode last night, Quentin Letts believes the Beeb could have a hit on its hands

Guy Andrews manages to work some of Wodehouse’s prose into the Blandings dialogue.

A magistrate is said to be ‘that crooked he could hide behind a spiral staircase’. Mr Andrews says he found himself ‘thinking in Wodehouse language’.

About one persuasive female character, he writes: ‘She once made such a forceful case for beetroot that I put some in my mouth.’ The Master might have enjoyed that line.

The series was filmed in Northern Ireland at Crom Castle. But that presented a problem. In the Wodehouse stories, the Earl’s pig is a black Berkshire sow. The island of Ireland was searched, north and south, but no black Berkshire sow of sufficient avoirdupois could be found. So an artistic compromise was reached and a Middle White pig was cast.

‘Empress was a sweetie,’ says Andrews. ‘A fantastic amount of time was wasted trying to coax her to do the simplest things — stand up, sit down — but like her character, she just wanted to eat.

‘In the series, Empress is described as being 46 stone, but she was, in fact, only 36. Prize-winning fat pigs of the Edwardian era frequently topped 80.’