Mapp and Lucia: A garden for social climbers

A scene from Mapp And Lucia.

Even I, inordinately fond of E F Benson's Mapp and Lucia novels as I am, wondered at the wisdom of adapting them (again) into television for an audience seemingly enamoured of the plebeian delights of such things as The Bachelor, My Kitchen Rules or Keeping Up With The Kardashians.

This is pure snobbery, of course. But that's the point of Mapp and Lucia - to point fun at snobbery, or more accurately the affectations of a peculiar lot of English upper middle-class dwellers in a certain kind of small English villages in the 1920 and 30s. The novels are gentle satire, mostly affectionate, frequently eccentric, occasionally plunging a well-aimed and nicely sharpened secateur right into the heart of the characters' social climbing pretensions.

The books - and this new series of three episodes (Vibe, 8.30pm Mondays; repeated on Fridays, 7.30pm) is pretty true to them - focus on the petty machinations of bored people who, in today's parlance, really should get a life (or a job.) They vie to be the most popular in the village; to throw the best soirees; to flaunt the latest fashions, however ridiculous; to have the most famous friends.

They are, then, pretty much like the people on those aforementioned reality TV shows, although they'd look down their sniffy noses at such modern nonsense. You could update Mapp and Lucia - today they'd be slugging it out on Twitter and Instagramming every soiree - but there's no need.

This new adaptation is a delight, almost cartoonish in its busyness which perfectly reflects the lives of the two protagonists, Miss Mapp and Lucia. It is Miss Mapp's house in Tilling (actually set in the pretty cobbled streets of Rye) Lucia moves into for the summer after her long-suffering husband, "Peppino" dies (probably of exhaustion from all that social climbing) and she desires a break from the "rut" of her beloved Riseholme where she rules the roost.

The catch is that in Tilling - where Miss Mapp rules the roost - the inhabitants have a completely barking tradition of letting their houses, mostly to each other, for the summer and moving into someone else's house just down the cobbled street.

So it is war for the summer, with those nicely sharpened secateurs. The battleground in Benson's books is often the garden, those genteel English gardens where much skullduggery goes on in the herbaceous borders.

If you come out one morning with your handmade willow trug over one arm to pick the sweet peas and find your prize delphiniums down, it is just as likely to be your envious neighbour who felled them in the night as it was slugs.

The barbs in Benson's gardens come not just from the rose thorns. When a visitor to the garden party recommends fuchsias for a gap, Miss Mapp gives her a good look up and down before delivering the withering proclamation: "I can't bear fuchsias. They always remind me of over-dressed women." You know, without having to be told, that Miss Mapp is quite aware of the fact that the visitor's own garden is awash with frightful fuchsias. And that the visitor knows she knows.

The cast of characters is quite endearingly mad - from Lucia's constant companion, the roundish Georgie (Steve Pemberton) with his foppish outfits and badly dyed ginger moustache and the toupee he imagines nobody knows about, to the butch painter, Irene, who wears sailor suits. But it is Miranda Richardson's gloriously ghastly Miss Mapp who steals the show - even as Lucia is stealing her character's social status. She has a face like a slapped moray eel.

- Timeout