On Television
KITMAN, MARVIN
On Television REVISITING 'BRIDESHEAD REVISITED' BY MARVIN KITMAN PEOPLE DIDN'T watch Brideshead Revisited as much as you might think from all the newspaper raves and early blockbuster ratings. On...
...IT MUST HAVE seemed a jolly good idea to book Buckley as host for a show about Lord Marchmain and his family...
...Buckley's introductions to each installment were as sloppy as his epilogues were weak...
...I could not put it down...
...He may have been the one who was scaring away the audience during the second half of the run...
...Their wealth was obvious from the opening episode, where we went to college with son Sebastian and with Charles...
...I didn't even read Waugh's book in prep school: In the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn where I grew up, you just didn't read books by a British guy with a girl's name...
...Buckley reminds me of Nat Holman, the illustrious CCNY basketball coach during the glory grandslam NCAA/ NIT championship of the 1950s...
...Nor should it be forgotten that the ins and outs on efforts like Masterpiece Theater and Great Performances are the only footage the American public TV people add to a foreign product...
...I've read the criticism of Brideshead Revisited that has appeared in the revisionist press...
...Maybe Buckley is Bridey...
...I got the impression Buckley was unfamiliar with the novel, or that he had last read it in prep school...
...Probably our most underutilized video intellectual, Sheed sat there smoking a cigar, cocking an eye and ear to Buckley's questions...
...Why, when Olivier died on the screen he simply moved an eyelash and made everybody else look like an amateur...
...They made the Bellamys of Eaton Place in Upstairs, Downstairs look like a welfare family...
...Fortunately, Sheed was excellent as a designated mouth (Peter Glen-ville and Hugh Kenner, the other inter-preters-in-residence, were pretty good too...
...I'm hardly a student of British history, and as a result Episode Seven (about the general strike) was baffling...
...Yet Buckley kept cutting him off in the middle of his most trenchant points...
...At the risk of having William F. Buckley stick his tongue out at me and wet his lips, I would suggest that he redo his ins and outs before Brideshead Revisited is rerun in America...
...They were like salted peanuts—one was not enough...
...Either his segments were deliberately underproduced to make them seem spontaneous and free-form, or the host was unprepared...
...The ins and outs are their entire input and output...
...You remember, the one with champagne and plover'seggs...
...You could always tell who had sardines by the oil stains...
...It's downright scandalous...
...And in the pre-Falkland days one sensed a good deal of anti-British feeling: As Murray Kempton observed in an Esquire profile the other month, "nobody likes the British anymore...
...I wonder whether WNET/13's management was too busy cooking up the next fundraising drive to even bother looking at their shirt-tails...
...As soon as the Brides-head music started on successive Monday nights beginning last January 18,1 was transported to another time and place on a magic carpet...
...I wouldn't be surprised if he actually read the book before facing the camera...
...Like the preface to a book, a solid intro enhances and glorifies...
...You've noticed how the credits always say "produced by Joan Sullivan of WGBH/Boston," or "produced by Jac Venzaof WNET/13...
...I was really goggle-eyed at the luncheon Sebastian threw for his classmates in his rooms...
...He should show more respect for the TV classics next time...
...Some of the wonderful runs of dialogue, like Blanche's remarkable dinnertable evaluation of Sebastian delivered to a wide-eyed Charles Ryder, played by Jeremy Irons, were hard to hear the first viewing...
...Moreover, the characters were too effete, and the photography was misty, as if Brideshead were a remake of Elvira Madigan...
...His face was set in a perpetual pained grimace that was contagious...
...I shouldn't talk about reading the works dramatized on TV shows...
...Having access to home reruns is one of the many advantages of being a TV critic with a powerful magazine: I called up my local public TV station and ordered all 11 episodes sent to my house "for research...
...It tells everybody that what they are about to watch is not some cheap show...
...Poor, weak Sebastian did get to be a drag af ter a while—even his teddy bear got stoned from his breath...
...Without window dressing, a series would be taken less seriously...
...I don't care what they say about English being my native tongue, I have trouble understanding the better British actors...
...The opulence, the decadence, the story as well as the music were all totally enthralling...
...They also said it was too slow, and I know for a fact that there was not enough action to capture the attention of a graduate of Columbia College on his way to law school (my own son yet...
...He almost sounded more British than Bridey...
...Maybe the time warp affected warped minds the most, but I found everything about the spectacularly produced Granada television series hypnotizing: the visuals at Brideshead (in real life the family cottage of George Howard, head of the BBC...
...For me it was an experience as engrossing as a good novel...
...He seemed to be as much of a twit as Bridey (Simon Jones), the insufferable eldest son of Lord Marchmain...
...the great performances, especially Anthony Andrews as Sebastian, Sir John Gielgud as Edward Ryder, Nikolas Grace as Anthony Blanche, and Sir Laurence Olivier as Lord March-main...
...On some blocks, in fact, only one person was tuned in...
...In the case of Brideshead, he should have pointed out what is interesting and put things in their historical context, so that even an American could get it...
...on others, none...
...Buckley gave me no clue as to what was going on, and I bet I wasn't the only one at sea...
...First they said that it was too faithful to the book, then that it was unfaithful (with infidelity like this, who cares about sin...
...He spoke Oxonian, too...
...Not that it was ever easy to relate to the characters...
...It just goes to show you, Brideshead was the kind of series that reminded people of their class, or lack of it...
...Worst of all, William F. Buckley would bring me do wn at the end of each show (after I had endured his introductions) with his outrageous interviews...
...I remember having lunch with him once in the '60s at a famous Monocle magazine roundtable (based on Punch's custom of inviting noted humorists to a feed...
...His habit of making faces did not improve matters either...
...Someone asked him what he would do about the drought if elected...
...Come to think of it, I did have plover's eggs once...
...Really overrated...
...Mesmerized again, my wife and I watched six episodes in one week (talk about opulence and decadence...
...Novelist Wilfred Sheed, who was with Buckley for the first four episodes, was actually born and schooled in England and he didn't feign a snooty drawl...
...Most of the time, Buckley was no help...
...Actually, the series was better the second time because I caught more of the dialogue...
...Introductions on prestigious public TV serials are supposed to tell viewers what has happened in the story so far, much the way teasers introduce Dallas segments...
...The Marchmains were rich rich, if you know what I mean...
...It conjured up memories of the lunches we had at City College...
...WNET/13 in New York is the public TV producer of record for Brideshead Revisited...
...After all, Buckley is such an aristocratic fellow...
...Holman and Buckley are the two most convincing Englishmen I've ever encountered...
...His mummy had sent them up with the driver...
...Reading itself was suspect...
...Viewers count on the TV host to be familiar with the background of the show, explain what might be murky...
...Buckley was also like Bridey in that he had a certain lack of humor about his ignorance...
...He was particularly insightful on Waugh and the March-mains...
...Buckley merely read a few lines recapping only the previous episode, but in the wrong tense so that it seemed he was describing what you were about to see...
...You may protest that I am making too much of the intros and outros, or shirttails, as they are also called...
...We used to have hardboiled eggs, prepared by our mums at home and carried to the cafeteria in brown paper bags...
...Lady Marchmain (Claire Bloom), Buckley and I were always the three people the most in the dark about what was happening in the family...
...Sheed is such a polished gentleman that I can see him as a new Alistair Cooke, should there ever be a need for a new one (which I doubt—-Cooke will be around as long as TV, or Methusaleh...
...One would think he'd have at least perused it before the show— decent thing to do, wot...
...I would have clobbered Bill with my cane...
...As I've suggested before, subtitles would boost the audience for British shows...
...The whole operation was out of synch...
...Sir Hugh Wheldon, former head of the BBC and now chairman of the Board of Governors of the London School of Economics, treated me to lunch at his club (the Garrick), and as an appetizer we were served the season's first plover's eggs...
...They were green speckled things, and they tasted green too...
...I didn't care...
...I suspect the 11-part adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's novel about the British Catholic aristocracy wasn't commercial enough for Public Broadcasting Service viewers (who watch a lot of commercial TV—secretly, of course...
...On American public TV, though, they are incredibly important...
...Their grabbing of the credit, given the slapdash quality of the Buckley package, is especially galling when juxtaposed to the meticulous production of the series itself...
...They will run up the aisle for the Emmys this spring...
...He dryly observed, "Let them drink wine...
...Gee, I thought, the lifestyle at Oxford in the '20s was different than that of CCNY in the '50s...
...The same magical thing happened the second go round...
...At the time there was a water shortage in New York, and the noted editor of the National Review was running for mayor (this was before he was a TV star...
...Considering Buckley's upbringing in Connecticut, I suspect this accent business is an affectation, something he might want to see a doctor about—maybe there are some pills he can take for it...
...OK, so the show had its flaws...
...the trips to Oxford, London and Venice...
...Sheed just smiled...
...Although he can be brilliant discussing politics on public television's Firing Line, in his Brideshead assignment Buckley was tedious and at a loss for words...
...After 6.7 hours of viewing commercial television per day (the national average, although most of us are below average), I'm sure the American public can't understand English English...
...But Buckley's contribution to Exxon's Great Performances offering—the ins and the outs as they are called in the trade—were disconcerting for other reasons as well...
Vol. 65 • May 1982 • No. 9
