Live-action a natural fit for charming ‘Willows’

Given the frequency with which it has been remade as a movie, TV show, stage play, radio play, ballet, cartoon, audio book and what have you, “The Wind in the Willows” -- Kenneth Grahame’s 1908 book about a toad, a mole, a water rat, a badger -- clearly occupies a place central and deep in the British imagination. (In America, by contrast, it has most famously been turned into a ride at Disneyland.) Among its theatrical adapters have been “Pooh” man A.A. Milne and Alan Bennett, of “Beyond the Fringe”/”History Boys” fame; Terry Jones directed and starred as Toad in a 1996 film version whose cast included all the surviving members of Monty Python; and Bennett and Python’s Michael Palin, as well as Michael Gambon and Vanessa Redgrave lent their voices to an animated version that same year.

A new live-action version -- featuring vaguely animalized humans, I suppose I should say, and not computer-enhanced talking animals -- with “Little Britain” star Matt Lucas as Mr. Toad and a supporting cast that includes Bob Hoskins and Imelda Staunton, turns up stateside Sunday night on “Masterpiece Theater.” It’s a modest production -- not cheap, by TV standards, but of a naturalistic simplicity -- fitting to a tale of small creatures living in the unkempt, half-domesticated spaces between the Wild Wood and the Wide World in an England that had not yet lost its wildness, nor for that matter its mildness. (The countryside around Bucharest stands in handsomely and, to a Southern Californian eye, persuasively.)

Directed by Rachel Talalay from a script by Lee Hall (“Billy Elliot”), the film cleaves as close as practicable to the book, attempting to honor both Grahame’s non-plot-advancing pastoral rhapsodies and the more usually featured knockabout comedy of Mr. Toad’s misadventures with motor cars. It will not lay you on the floor rollicking with laughter, but it is sweet and gentle and, refreshingly, not overly dependent on Special Effects for its special effects. You will want to let your children watch it, if you happen to have any around, but given the unfriendly hour of its broadcast -- 9 p.m. on a school night, on a day when little people will have already knocked themselves out on chocolate eggs and marshmallow Peeps -- you will also want to time-shift.

There is, of course, always some magic lost in translation, in making concrete the ambiguities Grahame could make live in words: a world in which a toad might dress in rags and pass for a washerwoman. This is a world -- easy to imagine, harder to picture -- in which animals drink beer, eat tinned sardines, wear galoshes, carry pistols, drive cars, buy train tickets and read newspapers (bless ‘em), and answer, when necessary, to the long arm of human law.

As in Jones’ film, the actors are not overly encumbered by their costumes; their animal selves are suggested merely by small appliances, hairstyles and bits of physical business. As the ironically wide-eyed Mole, Lee Ingleby (“The Street”) wears a pointed nose and hair combed down over his ears (as moles have none, not the floppy outside part anyway). As Rat, for whom “there is nothing -- absolutely nothing -- half so much worth doing as simply messing-about in boats,” Mark Gatiss (from the League of Gentlemen comedy troupe) gets a set of stiff whiskers. Gruff and serious Badger (Bob Hoskins) has been given upswept hair, eyebrows and sideburns that somehow make him look like a cross between Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine and Yoda. They all do lovely, quiet work.

The loudness all belongs to the appropriately hairless Lucas -- he suffers from alopecia -- who has been painted with a few amphibian markings and built up here and there into something suitably toad-like. Lordly and grandiloquent, jolly and petulant, imperiously obsessive, his Toad is a study in development arrested by inherited wealth, a big baby essentially, not wholly unrelated to some of the characters he’s created on “Little Britain.”

The show flags a little in the action sequences, especially the climactic fight against the weasels who have taken over Toad Hall during its owner’s incarceration -- Talalay does better with the poetry than the motion, one might say, but since it’s usually poetry that suffers in such face-offs, that’s not really a bad thing. There is a reason Grahame named his book “The Wind in the Willows” and not “Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride,” and you can see it here.

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robert.lloyd@latimes.com

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‘Masterpiece Theatre: The Wind in the Willows’

Where: KCET

When: 9 to 10:30 p.m. Sunday

Rating: TV-PG (may be unsuitable for young children)