Video: Memories of a Golden Past

A lavish British series mirrors Evelyn Waugh, faults and all

BRIDESHEAD REVISITED PBS, beginning Jan. 18, 8 p.m., E.S.T. It is an odd book by one of the century's oddest writers, and even he had serious reservations about it. "I reread Brideshead and was appalled," he wrote Graham Greene in 1950, five years after publication. But Brideshead Revisited, overwritten and underplotted, is and probably will remain Evelyn Waugh's best-known and most popular novel, a lush, sentimental tribute to Catholicism and to the period between the wars that Waugh regarded as the last gorgeous days of the British aristocracy. Now, in this lavish and beautiful eleven-part series from Britain's Granada Television, U.S. viewers will be able to see why a book so often derided is yet so often loved.

Probably never before, in fact, has a novel been so faithfully adapted. John Mortimer's script preserves big chunks of Waugh's narrative prose in addition to his dialogue. "We went for the book whole," says Producer Derek Granger. "We were true to its faults as well as its virtues, but the faults—the over luxuriance, for instance—are also rather appealing. Waugh wrote it during a very bleak period of World War II, and he looked back to his days in Oxford as golden, halcyon." The most expensive TV production ever to come from Britain (about $9.9 million), Brideshead Revisited has a cast that includes John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, Claire Bloom, Mona Washbourne, Jeremy Irons, Anthony Andrews and Diana Quick. Not to mention, of course, that wonderful baroque pile called Castle Howard, which may indeed be the very louse the author saw in his mind when he described the fictional Brideshead, first glimpsed on a cloudless day in June, "prone in the sunlight, gray and gold amid a screen of boskage."

The young man who does the glimpsing is Brideshead's narrator, Charles Ryder (Irons), who finds his army unit bivouacked by coincidence on the grounds he knows so well. He had been introduced to the house years earlier by one of its inhabitants, Sebastian Flyte (Andrews), an Oxford classmate renowned for "his beauty, which was arresting, and his eccentricities of behaviour, which seemed to know no bounds." In the flashbacks arising from Ryder's bittersweet memories, Sebastian gives long, champagne-inspired lunches in his rooms and, in an extravagant undergraduate fantasy, carries with him everywhere a large Teddy bear named Aloysius. Charles and Sebastian form a strong attachment and probably—although the relationship is kept behind its own screen of boskage in both the book and the series—become lovers.

Ryder soon falls in love with the entire Flyte family and becomes for a time almost an adopted son. His own widowed father (Gielgud) is comically austere in his affections; when his son returns to their London home after 15 months, he looks up in unhappy surprise and says, "Oh, dear." The Flytes, by contrast, are warm and charming. Their only fault, in Charles' conventional Anglican eyes, is their obsession with their exotic, un-English Catholic religion.