It was first broadcast on BBC One from 13 January 2013, and stars Timothy Spall, Jennifer Saunders, Jack Farthing, Tim Vine and Mark Williams.

Set in 1929, Lord Emsworth (Spall) resides at Blandings Castle, along with his imperious sister Connie (Saunders), his empty-headed son Freddie (Jack Farthing), and any number of houseguests, love-struck nieces and their boyfriends.

[5] Lord Emsworth, keen that his fat pig, the Empress of Blandings, should win the 87th annual Shropshire Agricultural Show, is distraught when his pigman, Wellbeloved, is sent to prison for fourteen days for being drunk and disorderly, especially as the magistrate Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe is his rival for the prize.

He borrows the cook's mongrel and buys two tons of dog food, which he tries to sell to Connie's old schoolfriend Veronica Schoonmaker and her American millionaire husband Jimmy as a means to making his fortune.

At the same time, worried at how his Aunt Connie will react to the news, Freddie tries to keep secret that he has married the Portuguese exotic dancer Paquita Manganara while in a state of drunkenness.

Freddie turns up at Blandings, owing money to an East End gangster, with beguiling dancer Georgia, who takes a fancy to Beach and is determined to make him dance.

When the gardener Angus McAllister resigns on the eve of the Blandings Fete and the visit of the children from the London Fresh Air Society, Clarence must do everything he can to get him back, including agreeing to allow his beloved moss path to be gravelled.

The newly reformed Freddie determines to keep on the straight and narrow by helping his father avoid having to give a speech and wear a top hat at the fete, until he is tempted by the children's attractive teacher, Miss Younghusband.

Freddie returns having sworn to give up women for good and devote his life to alcohol, until he meets Amazonian Monica Simmons, the niece of Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe and Wellbeloved's replacement, who arrives at Blandings with the impoverished Dowager Lady Daphne Littlewood and her young son Huxley, the new Marquis.

As Clarence prepares to propose he discovers that Daphne is only after his money and that her interest in The Empress is feigned, and she is forced to leave Blandings for good taking the complaining Huxley with her.

Colonel Horace Fanshawe, with his daughter Valerie, calls to sound out Clarence as his successor as Lord Lieutenant of Shropshire, an honour for which Connie is desperate.

Ben Lawrence of The Daily Telegraph awarded the first episode two stars out of five and wrote that the lack of Wodehouse's "authorial voice", ever present in the books to add "clarity and depth" and "invest psychological complexity into [the] characters", left the cast "all at sea".

[8] Tributes were paid to Empress, the Middle White sow used in the show, when she died from what vets believe was a "massive heart attack" just before the final episode was broadcast.