Brideshead Revisited

Evelyn Waugh, who liked neither medium, has been better served by television than by the cinema. The 11-part 1981 Brideshead is a landmark in TV history, there's been a decent version of Scoop and two shots at his greatest work, the Sword of Honour trilogy, the first one (adapted by Giles Cooper and starring Edward Woodward) being the better. Hollywood made a travesty of The Loved One. The film version of A Handful of Dust (the work of the director and producer of the TV Brideshead), starring Waugh lookalike James Wilby, was fairly decent, but the early satires Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies turned into tedious affairs. When, in 1947, MGM optioned Brideshead and his friend Christopher Sykes mentioned other great writers who'd survived screen versions, Waugh replied: 'I'm not Shakespeare or Thackeray or Emily Brontë. They lived out of the age of films. They are immune from the contagion. I am not.'

Sadly, Julian Jarrold's big-screen Brideshead Revisited, adapted by Jeremy Brock and Andrew Davies, is dull, perfunctory and moderately efficient. At the centre is a dim performance from Matthew Goode as Charles Ryder, the narrator drawn into the aristocratic world of the Marchmain family and their peculiarly severe brand of Catholicism by his Oxford friend, the alcoholic homosexual Sebastian Flyte. Ben Whishaw, a talented actor, is miscast and misdirected as Sebastian, lacking the necessary aristocratic demeanour and altogether too hangdog.

There is little sense of the action being framed by two wars, one that destroyed a generation, the other that threatened to alter the social structure of a nation. Ryder mentions the death of his mother, but doesn't say she was killed at the front in Serbia, while Lieutenant Hooper, the surly lower-class representative of the Age of the Common Man and the likely face of postwar Britain, has been demoted to corporal and given just two lines.

What we miss is any equivalent of the rich fibre of Waugh's prose. Whatever you think of the characters, their world and their religion, Brideshead is a continuous delight to read. The film, conventionally made, is no great pleasure to watch. No one involved seems greatly interested in the moral and historical issues it deals with, as opposed to the opportunities it offers for costume parades and shots of Oxford, Castle Howard and Venice.