Buckley to introduce each episode.īrideshead Revisited, 1981. Early the following year, the show aired in the US, and PBS hired the smoothly sinister conservative William F. Still, there was a certain rhyme, if only in their floppy hair and cravats, between the male stars of Brideshead Revisited and the Thatcherite young fogeys being celebrated or despised in the British press in 1981. This equivalence has never quite made sense: Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative ‘revolution’ of the 1980s was built on an ideology of petty-bourgeois advancement (and monetarist reality), not on worship of aristocratic lineage, let alone interwar aestheticism. Also, to some, as a hymn to privilege, snobbery, repression, even union-busting – Charles and pals volunteer to help put down the general strike of 1926 – that perfectly suited the early years of acquisitive, prole-scorning Thatcherism. Julia’s separated parents, Lord and Lady Marchmain: haunted, unhappy personifications, respectively, of pleasure and piety.įilmed in Oxford, Venice and Castle Howard, Yorkshire, the eleven episodes of Brideshead Revisited were received in 1981 as a high point of heritage television. Sebastian’s sister, Julia, for whom the mature Charles eventually leaves his wife. Their louche, stuttering Oxford contemporary, Anthony Blanche, an exotic intimate of Jean Cocteau, Sergei Diaghilev and Marcel Proust. His friend and seeming lover, Sebastian Flyte, who is ruined (or is it exalted?) by nostalgia, booze and God. There is the melancholic narrator, Charles Ryder, quickly seduced and slowly disillusioned by aristocratic luxury and ease. In the autumn of 1981, a gilt stratum of English life in the 1920s and ’30s sauntered across British screens, its principals aching with desire and nostalgia.

The grace is more earthbound, the splendours more ravishing in Granada Television’s celebrated adaptation, which turns 40 this year. A meditation on ‘divine grace’, a hymn to the ‘splendours of the recent past’ – this is how Evelyn Waugh described his 1945 novel Brideshead Revisited.

Waugh brideshead revisited