Blandings TV Series: Cast, Episodes & Books

The BBC Blandings series, 2013–14

Blandings ran for two BBC One series: six episodes in 2013 and seven in 2014. Guy Andrews adapted Wodehouse’s castle stories for a regular television household headed by Timothy Spall’s Lord Emsworth and Jennifer Saunders’s Lady Constance. Jack Farthing plays Freddie Threepwood. The casting change to remember is Beach: Mark Williams plays the butler in series one, and Tim Vine takes over in series two.

The programme offers a different starting point from Jeeves and Wooster. At Blandings, the central desire is often simply to be left alone. Clarence wants to enjoy his garden and his pig; relatives arrive with plans, expectations and romantic emergencies. That opposition is a useful way into the books too. Start by asking what each visitor wants and what Emsworth wants to escape, rather than trying to memorise an entire family tree before your first story.

How the episode-to-book guide works

The screen stories should not be treated as thirteen consecutive chapters of a single novel. Some retain a short story’s title; others borrow from a novel and reshape it for the television cast. The table separates a documented adaptation link from a suggested comparison. A shared character, pig theft or painting is evidence of a connection, but it does not by itself establish a complete adaptation credit.

For the most direct comparison, choose a short story whose title survives on screen. Read it first, then watch for changes in who carries out the central plan, which relatives are present and how the final misunderstanding is untangled. The story is short enough to keep its structure in mind, so you can notice the adaptation’s choices without turning the exercise into homework.

Which Blandings book should a television viewer read first?

Blandings Castle and Elsewhere is the most economical starting point for viewers who want several of the episode sources together. It includes the pig-call story, the Gertrude story, the pumpkin story and Lord Emsworth’s encounter with Gladys. Its title is worth taking literally: the volume also ventures away from the castle. Those additional stories are part of the collection, not missing scenes from the television programme.

For a longer stay, choose Summer Lightning and then Heavy Weather. Treat them as novels with their own arrangement of characters and incidents, rather than as scripts for this show. If the series has made you interested in the older generation’s ability to cause trouble, Uncle Fred in the Springtime supplies a particularly rewarding change of pace. The publisher explicitly connects scenes from that novel to “Throwing Eggs”.

A later destination is Plum Pie, which contains “Sticky Wicket at Blandings”. This is a mixed collection, so check the contents before expecting a whole book of Emsworth adventures. Similarly, “The Crime Wave at Blandings” is found in the British collection Lord Emsworth and Others; the American collection bearing the story’s name has a different contents list. The collection guide explains that distinction before you buy.

The castle on screen and the castle in fiction

The principal filming location was Crom Castle in County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland. That production fact does not move Wodehouse’s fictional Blandings out of Shropshire. Keep three questions separate: where the story is set, where the camera stood, and which real houses may have contributed to the novelist’s imagination. They have different kinds of evidence and need not have the same answer.

The best way to use a screen adaptation is as an invitation to the prose. Faces, rooms and physical business make an immediate impression on television, while the books give you a narrator who can delay, qualify and mischievously reframe a situation. If you enjoyed the television household but find a character behaving differently on the page, follow the particular story rather than assuming one version must cancel the other.