Although showing on consecutive days and not billed as part of a themed sequence, BBC1 next week launches two new shows offering a broadcasting equivalent of what art curators like to call a "conversation" between pictures hanging on opposite walls.

Blandings (BBC1, Sunday, 6.30pm) and Father Brown (Monday, 2.10pm, BBC1) are both comedy-dramas based on books by Edwardian near-contemporaries: (1881-1975) and (1874-1936). Each series also represents in a sympathetic light people and themes that have in recent times been either ostracised from television or mocked,buy cheap dvd movies. Wodehouse's Blandings concerns the potty aristocracy, while Chesterton's Father Brown has a protagonist who is a likeable and decent Roman Catholic priest. And one actor has a prominent role in both: Mark Williams, who plays the clerical detective, is also cast as Beach, the butler of the barmy Lord Emsworth (Timothy Spall), in the Wodehouse adaptation.

While these links are largely coincidental, a more intentional connection is that both commissions attempt to revive particular types of TV that have fallen out of fashion. Blandings, which airs on Sunday teatime,blu ray movie rental, restores to that slot in the listings the sort of warm, innocent literary adaptation that is redolent of a mythical past Britain in which mother, father and two children huddled round a wooden television set while crumpets toasted on an open fire. And Father Brown continues BBC1's recent mission to bring back afternoon drama to TV: the sort of nostalgically reassuring fiction that was traditionally offered to those who were at home after lunch for reasons of either childcare, unemployment, retirement or influenza.

In that sense, there is a slight air of pastiche about both shows: a heritage recreation of TV of the past. But, though resistant to this element in advance, I was charmed by the slickness of the execution.

Blandings, for example, is, in every possible sense, a high-class comedy. , who has adapted it for television, audibly relishes the metaphorical swagger of Wodehouse's dialogue – "Sir George is that crooked that he could hide behind a spiral staircase" – which, bizarrely, is matched in 20th century popular fiction only by Raymond Chandler, who like Wodehouse ; presumably, it was either something in the water or the English teaching.

Mark Williams as Father Brown. Photograph: BBC/Des Willie

As with Chandler, it can be hard to find an acting style to match the high style of the speech, but director Paul Seed has demonstrated a knack for exaggerated reality right back to the great political drama , and it helps that his cast for Blandings includes Jennifer Saunders, whose own Absolutely Fabulous was Wodehousian in its use of posh horrors speaking vivid similes.

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the show is that upper class activities and language are presented without apology or explanation: a joke about the nature of Harrow School is delivered without sub-titles or nervous slumming down and viewers are trusted to understand a line from Saunders' Connie in which the punch-word is "."

Father Brown is less ambitious, using a structure standard in TV detective drama: an opening teaser sequence featuring murderer or murdered gives way to a methodical series of interrogations of suspects. The tone of gentle rural mayhem is reminiscent of Midsomer Murders, although Father Brown has the excuse that it is set in the 1950s rather than the supposed present-day. And there are also some stylish touches: a woman accused of murder signs a confession to the police in her cell and then has her confession heard by the priest, with the viewer understanding that the latter encounter has greater jeopardy for her as a Catholic.

Television has a notorious tendency to over-commission any genre that starts to look plausible and we wouldn't want too many more of these winter warmers. But this inadvertent mini-festival of initial-driven fiction is a pleasant surprise: PG and GK both prove, in their way, to be VG on TV.