O’Toole Romps in Frothy Wodehouse Tale

Dim-bulb Bertie Wooster and his resourceful butler Jeeves make no appearance in P.G. Wodehouse’s “Heavy Weather,” Sunday’s new “Masterpiece Theatre” offering starring Peter O’Toole, but as you might expect in a Wodehouse romp, wacky eccentrics abound.

As he proved in recent pizza commercials, O’Toole seems to have no qualms about making light of his legend. He moves through the film with a slightly horrific, spindle-shanked, drop-jawed, unkempt lunacy as Lord Clarence Emsworth of Blandings Castle, whose monomaniacal passion for swine is focused on a cosseted monarch of pig flesh named Empress of Blandings.

The Empress is only one of the major elements in this dizzy frolic. Others are Clarence’s younger brother’s scandalous memoirs, his nephew Ronnie’s imperiled love for chorus girl Sue, his secretary Monty Bodkin’s imperiled love for the worthy Gertrude Butterworth, his fearsome sister’s sharp tongue, and a most peculiar private eye named Percy Pilbeam (David Bamber, the unctuous clergyman in “Sense and Sensibility”).

Wodehouse’s farcical froth isn’t for everyone, but fans of his mischievous tales of an early 20th century England that never was will be in hog’s heaven. Filmed mostly at a lavish Gloucestershire castle, this diversion was nicely adapted by Douglas Livingstone and well directed by Jack Gold.

* “Heavy Weather” airs on “Masterpiece Theatre” at 9 p.m. Sunday on KCET-TV Channel 28.