All sorts of unseemly people coagulate in London

Clarence, the Earl of Elmsworth (played by Timothy Spall) and his wacky family (including resident pig, The Empress) are back with 7 all new adventures in Blandings: Series 2.  No matter how hard Clarence tries to spend time with The Empress and his books on pig husbandry, his various family members and their problems keep interfering with his plans.  Thank goodness he has the reliably placid butler Beach to help keep everyone in line.

Episode one starts out on a distinctly jarring note with the arrival of some house guests -- the disagreeable Alaric, Duke of Dunstable and his niece Linda.  The Duke is forever shouting at people, and, without much provocation, throwing eggs at them.  He's especially upset that his niece wants to marry the totally unacceptable Pongo Twistleton.  To make matters worse, Alaric is convinced that Clarence needs to be committed to an asylum, and calls for Dr. Glossop from London to come to Blandings to examine him.  In the meantime, Freddie, Clarence's perpetually broke but cheerful son, gets wind of the scheme and decides to get Pongo to impersonate the doctor.  Connie, Clarence's long suffering sister (played with delightful exasperation by Jennifer Saunders), wants the doctor to examine Alaric for possible committal.  It's general mayhem, as usual, with the added bonus of eggs being tossed about by the generally enraged Alaric.

Clarence has just breathed a sigh of relief at getting rid of the eccentric Alaric when more bad news arrives in the person of his other sister Charlotte and their niece Millicent.  Charlotte is appalled at the lax standard of things at Blandings, and declares her intention to move in.  Millicent takes a liking to Clarence's new secretary, Carmody, but Connie wants that relationship nipped in the bud.  Poor Clarence doesn't have time to deal with distressing domestic matters, however, because the fat pig contest is coming up, and his chief rival, Stinker Parsloe is surely up to something to give his own inferior porker an unfair advantage over the vastly superior Empress.  Freddie has a brilliant idea to make Carmody seem more acceptable to the family -- they will abduct the Empress, and Carmody will come to the rescue and find her.  When Clarence discovers the Empress is missing, he assumes the dastardly Stinker is responsible, so he decides to exact his own revenge.  While Stinker is innocent in the pig-napping plot, he is behind the scheme to give the Empress Slimmo pills before the big weigh-in . . .

 Poor Clarence doesn't have time to relax after all the narrowly averted disasters of the previous episode when more chaos descends into the house.  Brother Galahad arrives with a bombshell -- he's writing a tell-all memoir that will expose the secret escapades of all the upper crust people in their social circle.  Connie, of course, is horrified and offers to settle all of Freddie's debts if he will find the dreaded manuscript and deliver it to her.  Meanwhile, the fat pig contest is still on the horizon, so Stinker decides to hypnotize the Empress into dieting, but his plan backfires.

Clarence finally decides to rebel a bit against Connie's iron rule when he defiantly grows an unruly beard.  Naturally, he implements this rebellion at a time when Connie has invited the conservative and pious Lady Cloughly to stay at Blandings.  To complicate matters, the heating has gone out in the castle, despite the best efforts of Beach to beat the old boiler, Brynhilde, into submission.  When Freddie offers a movie crew the use of the castle as a location for their latest film, he has to tell his Aunt Connie that all the people and equipment are there to fix the heating. Starlet Pauline Petite has caught the eye of both Freddie and Beach.  Not realizing that a film is being made, Lady Cloughly is alarmed to see what's going on in the parlor between a disguised Beach and the actress Pauline.  The "tramp" who keeps wandering around the castle is also a bit odd . . .

Connie is once again hoping to advance a few rungs up the social ladder when she invites Colonel Douglas Fanshawe and his daughter Valerie to dinner.  Col. Fanshawe is the current Lord Lieutenant, which means he serves as official host to the King when he's visiting Shropshire.  He wants to retire from the ceremonial position and thinks Clarence might be a good man to take over.  Freddie, meanwhile, is pet-sitting his aunt

Julia's pug Mugsy.  Valerie takes such a shine to Mugsy that she takes him with her when she leaves.  Clarence, alarmed at the prospect of his sister Julia's reaction if she discovers the dog is missing, goes to Col. Fanshawe's home to steal the dog back.  Unfortunately, Beach the butler has discovered some "Swedish vitamins" that don't seem to be having the desired healthful effects, so he's unable to assist with the plot to steal back the dog.

Episode six once again sees poor Clarence with a houseful of bothersome guests. There's the American heiress Vanessa Polk, who has been hired to paint a portrait of Clarence and the Empress.  Lord Hannibal Didicot is enraged that Clarence sold him a worthless painting, and he demands his money back.  Brother Galahad is also visiting and assisting Freddie in his plots to somehow find the money to settle his most recent debts.  Freddie has a worthless painting of a horse the he hopes to sell to Lord Didicot, but he angrily refuses to buy it.  That is until he hears Vanessa talking about an extremely valuable painting, and thinks she's referring to the horse painting.  Connie is also hoping to do some match-making between Vanessa and Lord Didicot, which allows Freddie and Galahad to put a blackmail scheme into motion.

The final episode finds Connie finally putting her foot down:  her flighty nephew Freddie must get married.  Luckily, she has a suitable candidate in mind -- Felicity Parsloe-Parsloe, Stinker Parslow's niece.  Freddie, who up until this point had met few females he wasn't attracted to, is rather alarmed by Felicity.  She's taken to dressing like a man and only speaks in monosyllables.  Aside from her rather unconventional looks and manner, there's the added complication that Freddie has fallen madly in love with someone else: Niagara Donaldson, the niece of McAllister, Clarence's groundskeeper.  McAllister knows Freddie's history, and so resigns his position in protest.  The big pumpkin contest is coming up, and Stinker Parsloe immediately hires McAllister to spite Clarence.  Connie was complete opposed to Freddie's romance with Niagara, until Beach the butler reads in a society magazine that she is heiress to a biscuit fortune.  Now if Clarence can just woo McAllister back.

The slapstick situations and witty dialogue make The Blandings a totally enjoyable series.  The actors are all first-rate, and it's also fun to see familiar faces (Celia Imrie, Robert Bathurst, Harry Enfield) make appearances.  I hope this series will continue for more adventures in the beautiful, if chaotic, Blandings castle.

Disclaimer:  I received a copy of  Blandings: Series 2 from Acorn Media in exchange for this review.

Final Verdict for Blandings: Series 2:  Five Gherkins, for being a welcome return to the madcap adventures of a dysfunctional upper-class family

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If I may permit myself the vulgarity

You know how it is.  You just want to be left alone to spend some time with your beloved prize pig, but what with the various demands of running an estate, things never seem to work out.  That's the situation Clarence Emsworth, the owner of Blandings Castle, finds himself in during the mad-cap escapades of The Blandings.  This series, based on the stories of P.G. Wodehouse, stars Timothy Spall as the pig-loving aristocrat and Jennifer Saunders as his sister Connie.  In addition, Clarence's perpetually broke son Freddie Threepwood and the long-suffering butler Beach add comic touches to the wacky household.

Episode One begins with only two weeks until the Fat Pig contest, and wouldn't you know it, the pigman Wellbeloved gets sentenced to spend a few weeks in jail for public drunkenness.  It turns out the magistrate who sentenced him isn't exactly impartial, as he also has a chubby pig entered in the contest.  The poor Empress, Lord Emsworth's pig (who has won the competition 2 years in a row), is pining for her pigman and just won't eat for anyone else.  Luckily, the Lord's flighty niece, Angela, has taken up with a cowboy newly returned from America (much to her mother's dismay), and he knows a secret trick for communicating with pigs.

Connie, Lord Emsworth's sister, has had enough of the slack ways at the castle and decides it's time to straighten things out in Episode Two.  She does this by hiring a secretary named Baxter, played by David Walliams (at his smarmy best).  There's not much time to get everything sorted out, because Connie's old friend Veronica Schoonmaker and her millionaire husband (and five dogs) are on the way for a visit.  Freddie, Lord Emsworth's son, sees an opportunity to make money, and quickly orders several tons of dog biscuits that he hopes he can convince the wealthy visitors to buy.

The Blandings Fete is coming up in Episode Three, and Lord Emsworth is definitely NOT looking forward to making a speech to the assembled guests, no matter how much Connie insists that it's his duty to do so.  A visit from two London Fresh Air Children, sent from the dingy capital to enjoy some unspoiled countryside, soon adds more chaos to the house.  A nearly unintelligible, but perpetually irate, Scottish gardener is also a thorn in Clarence's side, with his plan to install a gravel path on some perfectly harmless mossy ground.

Episode Four finds Clarence with a full house again.  Freddie has brought home his new "wife" in the form of Portuguese dancer Paquita, but he tries to keep their relationship a secret from his aunt Connie.  Cousin Gertrude is staying, but she's pining for her unsuitable boyfriend, the accident-prone Rev. Bingham, who also comes for a visit under an assumed name.  With a society ball on the horizon, Connie has thoughtfully arranged a German dancing master, Herr Schnellhund, to give Lord Emsworth some lessons.  With all those comings and goings, who is responsible for the missing silver?

Just when he thought he was home free, Clarence is dismayed when Connie re-hires the dreadful Baxter to resume his secretarial duties in Episode Five.  It seems that Clarence has misplaced a very important letter from their sister Julia, and an exasperated Connie needs an expert to sort out the mess in the study and find the missing letter.  Meanwhile, Freddie is in hot water yet again, and brings the sister of the man he owes money to home with him to fetch the cash.  She, inexplicably, takes a liking to the butler Beach.  In the meantime, Clarence's grandson George tries to find live targets for his shooting practice.

Connie is thrilled when the widowed Lady Littlewood comes with her son for a visit in Episode Six, but it soon becomes apparent that she is looking to become the new lady of Blandings Castle.  Freddie swears off women, until he catches a glimpse of the gorgeous new "pigman," Monica Simmons.  It will take the combined efforts of Beach, Connie and Freddie to expose the devious Lady Littlewood's plans before she takes over and throws them all out.

The characters are all very likable and the situations are amusing, but of course the main attraction of this series is the witty dialogue by P.G. Wodehouse.  Some of my favorite quotes:

"This is no time to be slacking in custody." (concerning the jailed pigman)

The poorly pig, the Empress, is "flapping her palsied trotters."

"He's so crooked he could hide behind a spiral staircase."

"Apparently, he suffers from being an American."

"I shall eviscerate you with a small, blunt spoon ill-adapted for the purpose."

"The posteriors of the goddess have been ravaged!"

"Her non will be plussed off the scale!"

"It bloats the bowel and dulls the mind."

"You look like an ostrich goggling a brass doorknob."

"I suggest you disembarrass yourself of the table nappery."

"I did not creep.  I manifested silently."

"Would you excuse me?  I have to blackmail my father."

"That is just noise leaking out of your face."

"My brother has never been with us, but somehow his physical presence endures."

"Do you bash the shuttlecock from the feathered end?"

I really enjoyed all the performances and the beautiful country scenery in the series.  And we can only hope that the regal Empress will get her own spin-off show!

Disclaimer: I received a copy of The Blandings: Series 1 from Acorn Media in exchange for this review

Final Verdict for The Blandings: Series 1:   Five Gherkins, for being a very funny and light-hearted look at what really goes on inside a stately home

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