Decline and Fall Discussed by Radio 4 and Sunday Papers

Posted on April 2, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

The latest episode of BBC Radio 4’s Front Row featured a discussion of the network’s TV adaptation of Waugh’s novel Decline and Fall. Presenter Stig Abell interviewed scriptwriter James Wood and literary critic Suzi Feay, who writes for the Financial Times. The discussion takes place at the beginning of the broadcast and continues until about 11:00 minutes. Among the topics covered are Wood’s use of elements of Waugh’s novel in his script (answer: he used a lot). Feay is asked to put the novel, published in 1928, into the literary context of the time and to describe how Waugh’s style is translated to the screen. Abell characterizes the book as if “written by P G Wodehouse in a very bad mood,” and both guests respond by discussing the difficulty of putting some of that mood into the script, with particular reference to the character of Chokey and Waugh’s frequent jokes about the Welsh. A point is also made about the addition to the story of the pig’s head thrown from a window at Scone College in the opening scenes. Much has been said of that particular update in light of recent stories about the Bullingdon Club and Tory politicians. But it happens so quickly in the TV version that your correspondent didn’t notice it until a second viewing, even though he was watching for it. 

The Sunday papers have printed reviews of the first episode. Euan Ferguson writing in the Observer’s review of the week’s TV is the most upbeat:

A grand surprise arrived on Friday in the shape of Decline and Fall. It shouldn’t, perhaps, have been that much of a surprise, given that the man responsible for adapting Evelyn Waugh’s first published (and most splenetically Welsh-hating, liberal-baiting) novel was James Wood, also responsible for the ever-subtle Rev., and that the casting was able to plumb such glorious heights as Stephen Graham, Douglas Hodge, David Suchet and Eva Longoria. For once, an adaptation caught Waugh’s inner voice, that singular interwar fruity whine of pomp, self-pity and high intellect, the all leavened by an utterly redemptive sense of the absurdity of the human condition, particularly Waugh’s own. Crucially, this was achieved without resort to the artifice of narrative voiceover, à la Brideshead. Wood just picked his quotes very cleverly. … 

What emerges is a true comic fantasy, yes, but also one which captures that dreadful damp twixt-war tristesse: a certain boredom with politics, a certain class obsession, an irresolute yet total anger at… something. An End of Days. This BBC production, in which all excel, is thrillingly timely, given our fractious nation’s rude recent decision to Decline, and Flail, and also gives trembling hope that, finally, we might get a faithful rendition of the wisest funny novel of the 20th century, Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim.

Louis Wise reviewing the week’s TV in the Sunday Times spends most of his column on the  overrated and increasingly tedious BBC police series Line of Duty but manages to spare a bit of space for Decline and Fall which he found to be 

… a jovial three-part adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s first published novel, dating from 1928. As a Waugh fan, I was sceptical, but I have to say the cast are doing well so far, and many of the author’s lines remain as funny on screen as on the page. I fear, though, that any TV version will make this too cosy, too cartoonish. The book is certainly a caper, but it’s rendered superior by Waugh’s dark, cruel underlying tone. If we lose that, it’s just fancy dress.

In the Times’s Saturday edition, another critic (Hugo Rifkind), was somewhat more cautious:

… If I have a complaint, it’s that the whole thing threatens, just sometimes, to get a bit wacky. Waugh isn’t wacky. He is dark and bleak and hurt, and his best humour is positively suicidal. It’s the howl of a moralist adrift among blithe savages, who cannot live with his own unavoidable conclusion that all these terrible stupid bastards are better people than him. This series may appeal to people who fondly remember Fry and Laurie’s flawless Jeeves and Wooster, and there would be no particular shame in that. I’d prefer a bit of conflicted hate too, though. That’s what Waugh is good for.

The Sunday Telegraph’s review opened with this:

It’s all but 90 years since it was published, but Evelyn Waugh’s glintingly satirical debut novel still manages to feel more contemporary and relevant than much of the BBC’s Friday night comic output. This adaptation by Rev creator James Wood does it justice, tiptoeing skillfully through Waugh’s minefield of scabrous humour…

And finally in the Daily Mail, Deborah Ross found the adaptation

…a hoot and a riot. It’s satirical without ever spelling stuff out. And it’s been updated with some sly, modern jokes. The pig’s head flying out of the window was a dig at David Cameron, right? And I laughed and laughed and laughed…

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House and Garden Reprints Excerpts from Wine in Peace and War

Posted on April 1, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

House and Garden magazine has reprinted excerpts it earlier published from Waugh’s 1947 booklet Wine in Peace and War:

2017 marks 70 years since House & Garden magazine first hit the news stands as the quarterly ‘Vogue House & Garden Book’, bound to its sister magazine with a silk ribbon. As part of a series of articles delving in to the magazine’s history we revisit our Autumn 1948 wine guide by Evelyn Waugh, who encourages copious consumption of the best vintages.

According to Waugh’s Bibliography by Robert Murray Davis, et al., the excerpts were published under the title “On Wine” in a 1954 collection entitled House and Garden Wine Book, edited by Anthony Hunt, and later in the The Pan Book of Wine (1963). The excerpts come from material printed between pp, 33-77 of the original booklet. It may be that the excerpts were also included in an issue of the magazine itself in Autumn 1948. 

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Ear Trumpet Sold at Auction

Posted on April 1, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

One of Waugh’s ear trumpets sold at auction earlier this week. The hammer price was £2,200. Thanks to Rich Oram, who is suffering non-bidder’s regret, for passing this along.

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More Reviews (Mostly Favorable) of BBC’s Decline and Fall

Posted on April 1, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

The reviews of the BBC’s adaptation of Decline and Fall continue to pile up after last night’s transmission of Episode One. These are nearly all favorable. There was a split decision in the Guardian. An editorial thought the project misguided:

That BBC1 has decided to remake Evelyn Waugh’s 1928 masterpiece Decline and Fall as Friday night television is both good and bad news for viewers. The satirical novel of innocence crucified and risen is brilliantly witty. But we live increasingly in a world of social conflict that is ripe for dramatisation, yet often evades characterisation on screen. Instead we escape into a past or a fantasy imagined far in the future or just far away.

Their reviewer Sam Wollaston on the other hand thought otherwise:

There’ll be a hoo-ha about this adaptation, of course – the usual one. How can a work so dependent on the wit of the written word translate to the screen, the Waugh-mongers will cry. But this shouldn’t be seen as an alternative; it’s more a companion piece. Of course it doesn’t all go in, and will be lighter for it. But having reskimmed the novel, I’d say that Rev creator James Wood has done an excellent job. This is less adaptation and more like a damn good edit, which manages to retain verbal nimbleness as well as the novel’s essence and spirit (plus a little light racial awkwardness). And as for tossing a pig’s head into the opening scene with the Bollinger boys, well, I think that’s allowed, as well as further adding to modern political relevance. In fact, can you hear it, beyond the hoo-ha, coming from the ha-ha, where the author is buried, in Somerset? Actually, you can’t, because it’s not noise but silence – the sound of Waugh not turning in his grave.

Similar notices appeared in several news websites including iNews (Jeff Robson), The Huffington Post (Caroline Frost), and Arts Desk (Mark Sanderson). A dissenting voice was Ben Dowell in Radio Times who writes that the novel:

…is a dark read at times, bit it is also side-splittingly hilarious. Full of black humour, cruel satire and memorable caricature, the book is epic in scale but fabulous in its detail. I defy anyone to read the scene involving the Llanabba silver band and the school sports day without falling off their chair laughing. Pennyfeather’s plight is also strangely moving, as is the fate of some of the poor boys at the awful school. Waugh once said that every good novel could be written on two postcards – and if any aspiring writer needs an exercise in concision and comic timing then this is it.

So what about the TV adaptation which starts on BBC1 on Sunday? Well, it is a very expensive, beautifully-directed production stuffed with some excellent performances. But I am not sure it works…James Wood’s script unfortunately feels as flat as a pancake. It comes across as little more than a strung-together collection of Waugh’s best scenes, his lines of dialogue trotted out but never really flying (the school sports day in episode one is quite funny – how could it not be? – but nothing as hilarious as the reading of it).Waugh is so much more than his dialogue anyway. The pleasure of his masterpiece is in his narration – his descriptions, his nuances, his heavy irony, the dripping richness of his evocations, the way he hides his jokes. He’s so good, in my view, that it is probably impossible to adapt – so we can’t blame Wood entirely. But the sad fact is that it doesn’t really come together and, like Prendy, I have my doubts about whether this will attract a new fan base for Waugh. But I hope I’m wrong.

Your correspondent would have to disagree with Radio Times. The adaptation was accurate, no major characters or scenes were sacrificed, the settings were true to form, much original dialogue was saved, and the performances excellent (for the most past). It is sad that more could not have been made of the Llanabba Silver Band but at least they were present. The most brilliant performance was the brief appearance of Kevin Eldon as Mr Levy the school recruiter. He was even funnier than the novel. But close behind was David Suchet as Dr Fagan. In addition to the pitch-perfect delivery of dialogue from the novel, Suchet’s Dr Fagan responded to several of Chokey’s remarks with a simple affirmative: “He do. He do.” That was also funnier than the novel in circumstances where a direct translation into the script of Waugh’s dialogue involving Chokey could have been awkward and cringe making. The only disappointment was a minor one. Lady Circumferance (played by Ashley McGuire) didn’t sound like Lady Circumference does on the page. She looked the part and delivered dialogue as written by Waugh, but her voice was not sufficiently over the toff.

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Evelyn Waugh as a Tourist Destination

Posted on March 31, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Evelyn Waugh is mentioned in two recent articles in connection with places tourists might be likely to visit. The first is in an article in the Daily Telegraph’s travel column by Harry Mount. This relates to the centenary celebration of the British Institute in Florence where Mount was once an art student. This is not to be confused with the British Council which the Institute predates by several years. The Institute has a strong connection with Harold Acton, Waugh’s close friend from his Oxford days. Acton’s best known Florence venue is Villa la Pietra which is mentioned in the Telegraph article:

The colossal Renaissance villa, perched on the hills above Florence, owned by Sir Harold Acton. Here he entertained Evelyn Waugh and Princess Margaret. He left it to New York University.

Less well known is Acton’s ownership of a building in the center of Florence, south of the Arno. As explained by Mount, this is now:

… the Harold Acton Library, housed in the Palazzo Lanfredini, a 15th-century palace left to the Institute by the aesthete Sir Harold Acton on his death in 1994. Talk about a room with a view! I have spent some of my happiest hours in the high-ceilinged rooms of that palazzo, staring across the Arno to the Palazzo Corsini on the other side of the river. The Harold Acton Library is the biggest English language lending library on the Continent. I passed lazy afternoons reading Anthony Powell and Evelyn Waugh, who partly based Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited on Acton, his old Oxford friend. The library is crammed with books on Italy and art history, as well as English papers and magazines. After a leisurely day of Italian lessons and Renaissance lectures, I’d drift into one of the Institute’s cocktail parties, or listen to a talk, in English or Italian, from one of its visiting speakers.

In an article appearing on an Australian travel website (Traveller.com), a literary-themed self-guided tour of Oxford is recommended. The article (written by Steve Meacham) uses the book Oxford: A Literary Guide by John Dougill to map the literary sites. After visiting pubs and other sites associated with JRR Tolkein, CS Lewis, Colin Dexter and Philip Pullman, Meacham comes to Evelyn Waugh:

Dougill’s judgment seems particularly harsh on Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. Waugh was at Hertford College, and so was his narrator, Charles Ryder (though Hertford isn’t named). In the 1981 TV adaption, starring Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews, a corner of Hertford’s North Quad was used as the setting for Ryder’s ground floor rooms – into which the foppish Sebastian Flyte vomits through an open window on their first meeting.

The article concludes with a consideration of the poets and other novelists associated with Oxford, most particularly Lewis Carroll. 

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Papers Praise BBC’s Decline and Fall

Posted on March 31, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

The Times, Daily Telegraph and Guardian all make tonight’s first episode of the BBC’s adaptation of Decline and Fall recommended viewing. The notice in the Times’s “Viewing Guide” by James Jackson is the most detailed:

Alongside that other academia satire, Lucky Jim, Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall is one of the 20th century’s great debut novels. It helped to set a template for a strain of English satire in which pompous failures, manipulative women and alcohol conspire to create headaches for the hapless hero. … Jack Whitehall is convincingly bookish in the lead role, but the real fun is in the gallery of grotesques ripping it up around him. His Oxford dons, for example, are stiff-collared fogeys hammed to the hilt by Tim Pigott-Smith and Nickolas Grace (alumnus of another Waugh TV adaptation, Brideshead Revisited). David Suchet is Llanabba’s haughty headmaster…Meanwhile, the pupils are derisive, the common room decaying, and the alcoholic one-legged fellow don Grimes — Douglas Hodge, doing wonders with a potentially problematic character — gets Pennyfeather plastered, advising him to beat any of “the little turds” who put varnish on his chalk (the script is freely adapted). At least things look up when the alluring Mrs Beste-Chetwynde (Eva Longoria) asks him to be private tutor for her boy. What could go wrong? It all adds up to uncomplicated fun that captures hints of Waugh’s sour satirical undertow.

The tabloids also weigh in, with positive notices from the Mirror (“It all makes for a gloriously entertaining period comedy.”), the Evening Standard (“Friday night seems like an odd time for Decline and Fall to be airing. The new BBC comedy-drama boasts a period setting, a warm tone and an impressive cast that surely would nab it a Sunday evening slot – if Line of Duty wasn’t already there to give us all heart palpitations with its fourth series.”) and the Sun which finds Jack Whitehall “elevated to new levels of what he himself calls “proper acting”, and he passes with flying colours…Schoolboy and teacher shenanigans provide the laughs tonight, but things take a darker turn in the next two episodes…”

Radio Times also offers up support in the form of a feature article by Eleanor Bley Griffiths on Oxford’s Bullingdon Club and its inspiration for Waugh’s Bollinger Club in the novel:

When it comes to the real Bullingdon Club, there are no recorded instances of foxes being battered to death with bottles – but the secret society has a long history of bad behaviour….The Bullingdon Club pops up again in Brideshead Revisited (1945) when drunken members try to push Anthony Blanche into a college fountain. 

One dissenting voice comes from the New Statesman where Rachel Cooke writing in their TV and Radio column was less than enthusiastic:

Early Evelyn Waugh? No, me neither. But even if I was a fan, I would be slightly mystified by the BBC’s decision to commission an adaptation of his first novel, Decline and Fall (Fridays, 9pm). Why this book, now? The satire is somewhat laboured and it doesn’t score many points in the contemporary relevance stakes…

She finds much to like in the script and the performances (except for that of Eva Longoria as Margot Beste-Chetwynde):

Yet somehow it just never sparks to life. It is very silly and it is very white. How I wish the Beeb had done Scoop (again) instead.

The series starts tonight at 9pm on BBC One and will be available on the internet on BBC iPlayer shortly thereafter.

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BBC’s Decline and Fall Reviewed in The Tablet and The Spectator

Posted on March 30, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Two of the weeklies are the first off the mark with reviews of Episode 1 of BBC One’s Decline and Fall adaptation the day before it airs. These are by James Delingpole in The Spectator and Lucy Lethbridge in The Tablet and both are highly favorable. Lethbridge likes Jack Whitehall’s portrayal of Paul Pennyfeather and James Wood’s script adaptation but finds particularly praiseworthy the numerous supporting actors who:

…play to the hilt the gallery of grotesques that populate the lonely corridors of Llanabba. And how they have enjoyed themselves. David Suchet, splendidly, madly, off-kilter with an air of distracted distinction that hides an ineptitude of gothic proportions, is magnificent as the headmaster Dr Fagan. Douglas Hodge, once a stalwart young man of the 1990s classic drama, has adapted to middle-age triumphantly with a glorious performance as the ghastly, tragic, deluded Captain Grimes. …Then there is Mr Prendergast, “Prendy”, battered by religious doubts, the meaning of meaning, whose toupee has lost him every scrap of authority he ever had: “I don’t think anyone would fall in love unless they’d been told about it.”

Lethbridge’s only disappointment is Eva Longoria in the role of Margot Beste-Chetwynde (“too slight and uncharismatic next to the rich character parts playing alongside her. Her accent is all over the place and she mouths the words rather than understanding them.”) It should be recalled however that Margot is an outsider. Waugh described her as South American so one would expect some accent slippage. And her character as written by Waugh lacks the comic depth of the others.

Delingpole was skeptical of Whitehall’s ability to portray Pennyfeather with sufficient nuance but is in the end well pleased with his performance:

I’m happy to report that young Jack (still only 28, the bastard) has done Waugh proud. He has produced a performance, his most mature to date, entirely in the service of the part — which is to say, self-effacing, mildly bewildered, almost cipher-like in its modesty. Pennyfeather’s job, after all, is to act as the bemused butt of Waugh’s sadistic humour. The world is a cruel and unjust place, Waugh had already realised by the time (at 24) he published his first bestseller. Pennyfeather is his part autobiographical hero, part torture victim.

Delingpole also foresaw the difficulty of adapting a book which combined comedy with a pronounced darkness:

… the bleakness and callousness of Waugh’s world view which is — I suspect — tinged with not a little self-hatred. Waugh at Oxford — and he wasn’t the only one here present who felt that way — had more socially in common with Pennyfeather than he did with the Bollinger boys. … Get the tone even slightly wrong and you’d either end up with something queasily discomfiting or with something where all the jokes fall flat because everyone is just a caricature for whom you never really care. With this quite superb adaptation —scripted by James Wood (creator of Rev) — you do care because he has played it absolutely dead straight.

He expresses some disappointment in the apparent de-emphasis in the part of Chokey, Margot’s black lover, but can see how that may have been necessary: “This is the 1920s, after all — autres temps, autres moeurs.” The series starts tomorrow on BBC 1 at 9pm.

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Waugh, Helena and the Gnostics

Posted on March 30, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

George Weigel, author and Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, DC, has a written an essay aimed at generating interest in Waugh’s late novel Helena. Writing in the Catholic World Report, Weigel describes the novel as “slim and unappreciated” and, after a summary of the plot, explains that:

Helena discovers that post-persecution Christianity in Rome is embroiled in theological controversy, with various forms of Gnosticism threatening to reduce the faith to an arcane “knowledge” (the Greek “gnosis”) accessible only to the elite. So the elderly Helena, a practical British girl and something of a populist despite her status as Dowager Empress, decides to put paid to that nonsense by going to Jerusalem on pilgrimage and recovering the instruments of the passion: the physical evidence that Christianity, rather than being an esoteric myth, is founded on real events that happened to real people at a real time in a real place… Helena’s quest, which has its climax during Lent, is rewarded by the discovery of the True Cross. Helena is full of Waugh’s humor – including a hilarious putdown of Edward Gibbon and the anti-Christian motif in his [Decline] and Fall of the Roman Empire – which makes for easy and amusing reading. The author’s intent, however, was entirely serious…

Weigel concludes the essay with his explanation of Waugh’s intent and its application to a current controversy within the Roman Catholic Church relating to its teachings on marriage and divorce. You probably don’t have to be Roman Catholic or a Gnostic to understand and appreciate his conclusions, but it would help.

Waugh’s Catholicism also gets him mentioned in this week’s Spectator. This appears in A N Wilson’s review of the biography by Thomas Dilworth entitled David Jones: Engraver, Soldier, Painter, Poet. Jones was also a Roman Catholic as is mentioned in this conclusion to Wilson’s favorable review:

The other ingredient in the story, once Jones had found his spiritual home, is the texture of Catholic life in England between the wars. Dilworth evokes what a small world it was, Jones numbering among his friends Vicky Ingrams, Hugh and Antonia Fraser, Julian Oxford, Martin D’Arcy and Evelyn Waugh. Jebbs, Pollens, Burnses, Woodruffs and Actons abound, many of them slipping the impoverished Jones cigarettes, whisky and cheques. The pen sketches of many of these characters are masterly. I liked the story of Evelyn Waugh telling Jones that his fringe of hair made him ‘look like a bloody artist’. ‘I am a bloody artist,’ Jones replied. That really is the story of this wonderful book.

In another review of Dilworth’s book written by Laura Freeman in Standpoint, Waugh is mentioned among the influential friends in the art world who supported Jones:

Dilworth reminds us of his friendships with the great and the generous. Jones was always hard up, keeping his trousers together with safety pins and wearing his coat in bed. Jim Ede and Kenneth Clark organised subscriptions and pensions. Harman Grisewood, who developed the BBC’s Third Programme, and Tom Burns, editor of the Tablet, indulged and encouraged him. He was fond of Eric Ravilious, Stanley Spencer, Evelyn Waugh and T.S. Eliot, who published his poems at Faber. Anyone he really liked he called a “chap” — there was no higher term of praise.

UPDATE (11 April 2017): Rachel Cooke reviews Dilworth’s biography of David Jones in the Observer and has this to say about the allegedly reclusive artist-poet’s circle of friends:

… he is surely the most gregarious recluse who ever lived. He meets Yeats and Auden and attends Evelyn Waugh’s wedding; he has Christmas lunch with TS Eliot, and his new wife, Valerie (“Finished!” was Jones’s comment on Eliot’s creative life, on seeing his marital spooniness). What makes all this the more amazing is his itinerant lifestyle. For a long time, he lived at home with his parents. But he was always camping, too, turning up at friends’ flats ready to outstay his welcome.

Waugh reviewed Jones’ book-length poem In Parenthesis in Night and Day a few weeks after his wedding (Essays, Articles and Reviews, p. 195) and sent him a letter about a year later congratulating him on behalf of both himself and Laura on receiving the Hawthornden Prize for that book (Letters, p. 117). Waugh does not mention Jones as a wedding guest in his Letters and Diaries but must have admired him sufficiently at the time to have sent him an invitation.

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Waugh in the Media

Posted on March 29, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

A discussion of Waugh’s novel Scoop takes place in a recent episode of the Federalist Radio Hour. This involves an interview of Christopher Scalia by presenter Ben Domenech. Scalia begins by explaining, inter alia,  his background as an academic and nearly 8 years teaching English Literature at the Wise, VA branch of the University of Virginia. The predicate for the discussion is Scalia’s recent article in the Washington Post recommending Scoop as an alternative to the dystopian novels such as 1984 which are proving popular in the wake of Donald Trump’s presidency. See previous post. This discussion begins at about the 42:00 minute mark of a 55:00 minute broadcast. At one point Scalia illustrates the importance of making the public understand that they should put the media into proper perspective. He quotes Corker from the novel where the reporter attempts to explain to William Boot the basis for the media’s unjustifiably high estimation of itself. This is intended as a useful reminder to today’s equally self-inflated media.

In another interview widely reported in the gossip columns, actress Emma Thompson recalls having nearly walked out on the 2008 production of Brideshead Revisited in which she played Teresa Flyte. Thompson’s outrage was raised by the proposal made to one of the other female cast members (unnamed) to lose some weight before proceeding with her role.

Brideshead Revisited also makes an appearance on a website supported by the spirits industry. This recommends a top 10 list of spirit-based drinks with a literary background: 

In Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, the character of Anthony Blanche is a flamboyant and “overt homosexual”. Witty and charming, we are told “his vices flourished less in the pursuit of pleasure than in the wish to shock”. One of his such vices was a fondness for an Alexander cocktail, a blend of gin, cream and creme de cacao. Waugh himself, however, favoured beer or claret.

Waugh might well have put champagne (even when mixed with some form of spirits into a cocktail) ahead of beer or claret, which would normally be drunk with a meal rather than beforehand. 

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Decline and Fall Profiled in Independent

Posted on March 28, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

The Independent newspaper (still publishing online) has profiled the BBC’s upcoming production of Waugh’s Decline and Fall. The article is written by Gerard Gilbert and contains much of the same material from cast and crew interviews as that appearing in the other papers. Gilbert does, however, express more skepticism than some of the others. This is based primarily on his disappointment with the BBC’s adaptation of the P G Wodehouse Blandings stories which “only served to confirm for me that much can be lost between page and screen, especially humour so reliant on comic tone and use of language as Wodehouse and Waugh.” 

Gilbert also shares scriptwriter James Wood’s fears based on previous Waugh adaptations:

… as Wood points out, none of Waugh’s books have proved particularly attractive to television executives. “In my lifetime there has been a very famous Brideshead in the 1980s that people still talk about now, and the Sword of Honour trilogy was done with Daniel Craig and adapted by William Boyd. And that’s it. It’s not like the drama department where you get another Bleak House every 15 years – the kind of literary churn, Waugh is not part of that at all.” Perhaps part of the reason might be some of the attitudes and language in Decline and Fall would these days be problematic. 

Gilbert recognizes that this production will be a challenge but thinks the carefully chosen cast as well as the experienced Wood (who has the comic series Rev to his credit) may be up to the task.

An unidentified blogger posting on the site Light on Dark Water (26 March 2017, “Sunday Night Journal”) decribes his experience with the Waugh adaptation that perhaps caused the greatest disappointment, at least to Waugh himself. He downloaded The Loved One and watched it with some hesitation: 

Months went by and it remained unwatched. I was seriously considering deleting it but decided to give it a chance. So my wife and I watched it. When it was over, we said “Well, that was strange.” It was funny, but…I wasn’t quite sure what I thought of it, and whether I wanted to recommend it to anyone else. I thought I might watch it again, so instead of deleting it I left it there. Another six months or so went by, and a couple of weeks ago I watched it again. This time I said again, “Well, that was strange.” But it’s also very funny, in a monstrous kind of way. And yes, it is good, quite good on the whole, and so I do recommend it to anyone who likes Waugh.

The blogger goes on to explain that after the first viewing he had reread the book fairly carefully. This made it possible to understand that the adaptation often followed the book, even down to copying the some of the dialogue directly, but then went well beyond it with the plotline in which the Whispering Glades cemetery is to be redeveloped into a shopping mall or something similar after the “loved ones” are disinterred and launched into space. It sounds funnier than it is, but the blogger concludes:

And it all ties together: Glenworthy’s machinations [to redevelop the cemetery] are not an extraneous subplot but are directly connected to the triangle…My only serious reservation is with the treatment of Joyboy’s home life, and his mother. She’s barely present in the book, and seems at worst to do a lot of complaining. The filmmakers chose to make her something of a monster, an enormously fat woman with repulsive habits, and to give the relationship between her and her son a pathological twist. Those scenes are off-putting to say the least, and almost enough to make me dis-recommend the film. So be warned about that, but if you like Waugh and have a taste for black humor in general, have a go at The Loved One.

There are also more postings on the Decline and Fall adaptation. The BT.com site has some background material on Waugh and the novel (“Five things you didn’t know about Evelyn Waugh”). The first episode is favorably previewed on The National Student:

The script is updated and brilliant, featuring some great contemporary references…has the ability to embed you in the world of Waugh. Costumes and locations work seamlessly together, making the programme feel strangely like a period drama. Period comedies are a rarer breed at the moment, so this is welcome… a long overdue adaptation, but the first episode is slightly let down by a slight stagnancy that plagues it. … around 40 minutes in I found myself checking my watch and growing slightly restless. It picked up the pace not long after, but the action of the last few minutes felt rushed after a much slower 20 minutes.

And one of the actors Gemma Whelan, who plays one of the Fagan sisters (Dingy), can be followed on Twitter as she anticipates the series premiere on BBC1 this Friday. 

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