Connie is trying to impress Colonel Fanshawe, in the hope that Clarence might succeed Fanshawe as Lord Lieutenant of Shropshire; but Beach is behaving very oddly indeed..
Clarence's bid to win the Pumpkin prize is threatened by Connie's ambition to marry Freddie off to Sir Gregory's niece.
Clarence has grown an appalling beard, to the dismay of Beach and Connie, but Freddie needs Clarence to convince Hollywood starlet Pauline Petite of his bona-fides.
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Title: Blandings (2013–2014)
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| Series cast summary: | |||
| Timothy Spall | ... | Lord Clarence Emsworth 13 episodes, 2013-2014 | |
| Jennifer Saunders | ... | Connie, Lady Keeble 13 episodes, 2013-2014 | |
| Jack Farthing | ... | Freddie Threepwood 13 episodes, 2013-2014 | |
| Tim Vine | ... | Beach 7 episodes, 2014 | |
| Mark Williams | ... | Sebastian Beach 6 episodes, 2013 | |
Blandings Castle is dysfunction junction, the home of a chaotic family struggling to keep itself in order. Clarence Threepwood, Ninth Earl of Emsworth and master of Blandings Castle, yearns with all his soul to be left in peace; preferably in the company of his beloved pig, The Empress. But he never is. There is always someone who wants him to do something. Presiding over the blitzkrieg on his equilibrium is the baleful figure of his sister Connie, with whom he shares the house; at her shoulder is Clarence's brainless younger son Freddie and a panoply of friends, enemies, servants, spongers, private detectives, bookies and confidence tricksters Written by Guy Andrews
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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.