Nigel Farndale on the week's television: Blandings and Utopia The Blandings novels were set in the Twenties and, given his inclusion of the odd modern idiom, Guy Adams adaptation reflects the mood of them surprisingly well. In some ways, indeed, this is a more successful adaptation than the BBC's last big Wodehouse outing back in the early Nineties, its 23-episode Jeeves and Wooster featuring Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie. Although Laurie was exquisite casting as Wooster, I could never understand why they didn't have him narrating as well, not least because the books were written in the first person. In Blandings the casting of Timothy Spall as the amiable Clarence (Lord Emsworth) was left field. He can handle the aristocratic vowels well enough but he looks nothing like the Clarence described in the books (a long, thin, bald old man). As things turned out, it didn't matter, anymore than the wrong breed of pig mattered, because Spall's physical comedy was consummate: in one scene he arrived by bike, said his piece and then absent-mindedly turned his bike around 360 degrees, thus confusing himself about the direction he needed to go. I have a suspicion he might have modelled his portrayal on Boris Johnson. While Spall was imaginative casting, the same cannot be said for Jennifer Saunders as the formidable Aunt Connie. It was a role she could have done in her sleep and I would have preferred to see it played by a straighter actress, someone scarier and less obviously funny. Geraldine Somerville, perhaps. With Spall on such fine form, the rest of the cast could afford to give less, Jack Farthing being a case in point. His portrayal of the simple-minded Hon Freddie Threepwood was too caricatured. But for now we should perhaps give him and the others the benefit of the doubt and conclude that Blandings is not only delightful escapism, but also something you can safely watch with your children. The same cannot be said for Dennis Kelly's Utopia (Channel 4), a dark, post-watershed drama that aimed to get under your skin like imaginary spiders, and succeeded. The tone was set with the opening scene in which two dispassionate henchmen killed an assistant in a comic shop, as well as an innocent bystander, not brutally but almost kindly, persuading then that they had to "go to sleep" by breathing gas from a canister attached to the sort of mask an anaesthetist might use. They obliged nervously. The two reminded me of the enigmatic killer in No Country for Old Men. This is going to be disturbing, I thought. And interesting. And so it proved to be. It was about a graphic magazine called Utopia that was a cult among conspiracy theories, five of whom took part in an online forum to discuss it, and then agreed to meet in a pub, a good device for bringing strangers together. Two of them then went on to engage in a highly original - that is, fumbled and awkward - sex scene. I can't work out yet why this isn't called Dystopia, which would be a more appropriate title. But with five more episodes to go, no doubt that will become clear.