Blandings   Starring: Timothy Spall, Jennifer Saunders, Mark Williams and Jack Farthing ITV Studios Global Entertainment RRP: £19.99 3711535493 Certificate: 12 Available 18 February 2013

You are cordially invited to take afternoon tea at the sprawling estate of Blandings Castle. A domain called home by upper-class nitwits, faithful servants and pot-bellied pigs alike...

Reading P.G.Wodehouse is one of life’s small pleasures. The British, and in particular; the English, I would argue are one of the world’s masters of small pleasures. It’s in the blood, it’s in the soil and it’s in the soul. Strange thing to appear proud of but it’s fundamental to that spirit of the England of red buses, cream teas and cricket. Does that England exist any more? I’m not sure it does beyond the letters page of The Daily Mail or some brochure for a coach trip around the Cotswolds.

Small pleasures. Finding a fiver in an old jacket you haven’t worn for a while, a sit down with a strong cup of tea and a biscuit, finally removing a pair of wet shoes and relaxing into a warm fluffy towel. It’s all very twee isn’t it? And that is the difference between reading Wodehouse and watching it acted out on the screen or at the theatre.

Without the ever present turn of expression that makes you laugh out loud or the ready, warm knowing wit a Wodehouse production is a cavalcade of silly characters getting into scrapes and being delivered from them but a highly unlikely plot twist. It’s twee. It’s pleasant enough but it hardly captures this sense of Wodehouse sharing an amusing story with you. The characters bring you joy, the plots are a frame work to get these characters to dance for you and the language is a marvel.

Orwell knew this about the man and wrote a spirited defence of Wodehouse when he gave a rather poorly informed radio interview in 1941 from occupied Europe which was used as propaganda by the Nazis. The world of Wodehouse is closed. It was out of time and out of history. The world Wodehouse wrote about no longer existed, even then. It was not touched by the Great War, any mention of how the characters make their comfortable income is hand waved away and the lowest a gent could sink would be entering “trade”. Gasp!

So, I plead, if you must approach one of England’s funniest writers please crack open a well thumbed copy of The World of Jeeves like the 1967 edition I have in front of me. Delve in. Go on, you won’t regret it. Small pleasures, old boy, small pleasure.

To the television series. I, as you might guess, have been rather spoilt by Wodehouse, having read a large portion of his output. What was a television series going to offer me? Well, luckily I happen to know a number of people who haven’t touched a Wodehouse novel in their life. I dragged my fingers through their brains in a hope to find what they saw in this series.

… and, I hope to God I haven’t coined this phase, it’s the Downton Effect. It’s Sunday night television. It’s well acted (a little over at times), it’s splendid to look at (no argument there) and it is... silly. You don’t want ready wit and razor sharp lines on a Sunday night. You work all week. You want silly bubble gum for the eyes and in this respect Blandings delivers.

Will it get a second series? Depends how many people are like me and hope for a side splitter that it can’t possibly be. Can the magic of Wodehouse ever be captured on screen? I doubt it. It is exactly what it claims to be and no one can ever accuse it of being anything other. In the right environment it’s a treat; soft red leather chair, tartan blanket across the knee, watched through the haze of a good strong port and your best monocle. To the reader of Wodehouse a disappointment but a very understandable disappointment.

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D L Smales