Blott on the Landscape

1 9 8 5 (UK)
1 x 50 minute episode
5 x 55 minute episodes

In 1985, George Cole temporarily abandoned Arthur Daley to play Sir Giles in Tom Sharpe’s Blott On The Landscape.

Sir Giles Lynchwood was the Member of Parliament for South Worfordshire, a man with weird fetishes (which were indulged in extrovert sex sessions down in London) and a greedy desire to make more and more money.

In response to his wife’s insistence that they should have children or she would throw him – penniless – out of her ancestral family home (Handyman Hall, picturesquely set in Cleene Gorge), Sir Giles planned to direct a new motorway through the family home and pocket 50% of the value of the compulsory purchase of the mansion.

Rallying to its defence, the eccentric Lady Maud (Geraldine James) fought tooth and nail to preserve her home, assisted by her surreptitious gardener, Blott – a mysterious former Italian PoW (played by David Suchet) with an uncanny ability for mimicking other people’s voices – who was gradually revealed as a bomb-making anarchist who dedicated himself to the cause

At one point, the mad Lady Maud (a keen devotee of country sports) yanked out her left breast to ensure that a motorway hearing became a riot.

Dundridge (Hi-De-Hi‘s Simon Cadell) was the hapless man from the Ministry of Environment who found himself immersed in the murky goings-on.

Manic characters and farcical situations abounded, and the whole production seemed blessed with a colourful and vulgar joie de vivre never better demonstrated than by Julia McKenzie’s portrayal of Mrs Forthby  – the homely dominatrix who pandered to Sir Giles’ more devious sexual desires.

The six-part series was an adaptation by Malcolm Bradbury of Tom Sharpe’s black comic novel of the same name, first published in 1975.

The series first aired on Wednesday evenings at 9:00 pm on BBC2 between 6 February and 13 March 1985.

Filming took place at Stanage Park, near Ludlow.

Sir Giles Lynchwood MP
George Cole
Lady Maud Lynchwood
Geraldine James
Blott
David Suchet
Mrs Forthby
Julia McKenzie
Ganglion
Geoffrey Bayldon
Lord Leakham
John Welsh
Dundridge
Simon Cadell
Minister
Geoffrey Chater
Hoskins
Paul Brooke
Prime
John Grillo
Densher
Jeremy Clyde
General Burnett
Nicholas Selby
Mr Bullett-Finch
Patrick Godfrey
Mrs Bullett-Finch
Georgine Anderson
Miss Percival
Matyelok Gibbs (1)
Sylvia Barter (2)
Bessie Williams
Sarah Porter
Colonel Chapman
John Rapley
Sir Francis Puckerington
Esmond Knight
Marjorie
Ursula Jones