Blandings: episode one, BBC One, review It is easy to see why the interwar world of PG Wodehouse is irresistible to TV producers: ladies in cloche hats and gentlemen in Oxford bags having larks in capacious houses, sage servants, roguish bright young things, indomitable aunts. And in a country obsessed by Downton Abbey, a Wodehouse revival is timely. The characters that fill Wodehouse's work are untroubled by money, unfettered by society's conventions, and perhaps, most importantly, unscathed by the Great War. In other words they exist in an England that never was. Yet Wodehouse has a perspicacity and wisdom that prevent him from being mere froth. And that was the problem with Blandings (BBC One), a six-part adaptation of the Blandings Castle stories. There was no authorial voice, wry, gently mocking, poised with a sinuous metaphor or sprightly adjective. Instead we were on our own with Lord Emsworth (Timothy Spall), his baleful sister Connie (Jennifer Saunders), vapid son Freddie (Jack Farthing) and beloved pig, the Empress, as they went about their lives in a crumbling English stately home. You can't invest psychological complexity into Wodehouse's characters, the clarity and depth comes from the writing, and so the cast were all at sea. The performances weren't bad exactly, but there was an impression that the cast had raided the charity shop and were merely having a spiffing time in vintage clothing. Of course the benefit to Guy Andrews's script was that the lovely dialogue remained intact, and no line felt cumbersome or inappropriately modern. "You're a silly little nonsense aren't you?" said Heacham (Brendan Patricks) as he pursued the reluctant Angela (Alice Orr-Ewing), Lord Emsworth's niece. Angela was resistant because Heacham sported a moustache which looked "like a maggot crawled under his lip and died." Later, despairing of the match, she declared: "I will throw myself from the battlements. All over the begonias. Splat! But the lively chat could not save what was ultimately an arch and rather empty effort. Never were you drawn into the world of Blandings and never did you get a sense of the precise and comic world which Wodehouse created. Jeeves & Wooster, filmed by ITV in the Nineties, failed on this level, too, but at least there, you were rewarded with two performances from Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, who knew each other well and understood perfectly the relationship between the hapless socialite and his capable valet. Things may improve. Future episodes include appearances from David Walliams and pop star Paloma Faith, although it is hard to imagine how you could ramp up the camp much more.