BBC One: Decline and Fall

[DracoM]

Aptly named.

I am furious at the appalling cack-handed wreck we have just seen. The subtlety of humour and irony stomped out of it. And wasn't t it a PREP school in the book.


Gah!

[Serial_Apologist]

Yep. Shan't be watching any more of that.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

"R4"?

[DracoM]

Sorry in my rage....BBC1 of course...............

[kernelbogey]

I lasted all of fourteen minutes...!

It's one of Waugh's that I haven't read. I recently re-read Sword of Honour and Scoop and found the racism in the latter unbearable, although in my teens I had laughed out loud at some of the scenes (the Harrods scene, for example: 'We don't stock cleft sticks I'm afraid, sir, but we can have some cloven for you').

But this film looked like a terrible caricature.

[jean]

I was disappointed. Although I recognised lots of the dialogue (Though nobody in 1928 would have said Listen up!), I did conclude it needed the narrative context to work.

There's no subtlety. With an injury like the one we saw, we'd expect Lord Tangent to die.

They've toned down the racism, though; they had to.

And yes, it was a prep school, surely.

(Never realised before how Beste-Chetwynde was pronounced.)

[french frank]

(Never realised before how Beste-Chetwynde was pronounced.)

How is it pronounced?

[jean]

Beast-Cheating.

[muzzer]

I will give this a look. Never really got into Waugh. I see there is an In Our Time which I am now listening to. Cheating Beasts indeed...

[Richard Tarleton]

I think I've read most if not all of Waugh, some (this, Scoop), several times over 50-odd years, even B'head Revisited at least twice.... Very few comic greats survive the transition to the screen (think Cold Comfort Farm, my Desert Island read ) and have to say I didn't find this too bad at all. I recognised some passages/lines from the book - prize for the longest essay regardless of any possible merit (but wasn't that in Paul's first lesson? - maybe not). Readers would have recognised the mise en scène (grotesque prep school), it was contemporary, whereas today it is a historical relic - I went to one such, complete with a succession of Paul Pennyfeathers, Mr Prendergast and a Captain Grimes character who...well as the veil of anonymity is thin, let's just say firearms were involved (I realise that was Philbrick, this chap was a sort of amalgam of the two ). I was quite prepared to be disappointed, but soon relaxed and in the end thoroughly enjoyed it. The characters are gargoyles, exaggerated grotesques.... One or two lovely lines missing - Philbrick's scar (no, Saturday night in the Edgware Road...)....

PS....astute review from Hugo Rifkind in today's Times - "...the whole thing threatens, sometimes, to get a bit wacky. Whereas Waugh isn't wacky. He is dark, bleak and hurt, and his best humour is positively suicidal. It's the howl of a moralist adrift among blithe savages..."

Very difficult to transfer to screenplay/script.

[french frank]

Beast-Cheating.

Thank you .

Guardian's Sam Wollaston liked it too, RT.

[johncorrigan]

I've never read any Evelyn Waugh...indeed, till about twenty years ago I thought he was a she - there's nothing like a Scottish Education, I say. I thought it was quite amusing really - I mean I'd rather watch Jeeves and Wooster, but it was kinda nutty in a Billy Bunter for adults sort of way...Yaroo! Not as Waugh intended, I assume! It wouldn't make me read the book, but if I'm free next Friday between the holiday packing I might turn up again.

[DracoM]

I'n delighted that some found it worth watching. Sorry, but I am not giving ground on this: Waugh's irony, satire is all the more telling because it is NOT pantomime, but set up as if normal happenings YOU are at liberty to judge. This TV serial TOLD you how to react in every shot. It bullied you, smacked you in the face with OTT in overdrive.

And I am still steaming over the AGE of the pupils: that was NOT a prep school, which instantly changes the whole balance of those episodes and lost the subtlety of kids on the edge of knowing into in yer face adolescent posing - a trick Alan Bennett pulled off with far greater subtle aplomb and humour than here.

[ardcarp]

This TV serial TOLD you how to react in every shot. It bullied you, smacked you in the face with OTT in overdrive.

...it was on BBC1. All part of infantilising adults. Most programmes (e.g. the new Galapagos series) are on a Blue Peter level. Presenters speak more slowly, use a Ladybird Reading Scheme vocabulary and have to illustrate every other word with a screen shot. The Powers-That-Be are presumably intelligent people, so this dumbing down is either cynical, a desperate grasp for viewing figures...or probanly both. In the case of Decline and Fall, this meant serving it up as a Downton- Abbey-type costume drama.

[Richard Tarleton]

The new Galapagos series really is bad.....