by William Boyd
This policy decision to follow the book at all costs is commendable (it extends to set decorations, costumes, even—with one important exception—hairstyles) though I should imagine it’s going to be progressively hard to maintain in the second half. However, it does mean that the faults of the book are carried over to the film. Certain explanations are not forthcoming—notably in the case of Sebastian’s self-loathing and his mysterious shame “of being unhappy.” A charge of tedium is sure to be levelled, as it can be at the book. A lot more could have been cut with little damage, and, as it is, it’s going to have to be spread fairly thin to cover twelve hours of viewing time.
There is one slip-up, though, which seems, in the midst of so much attention to detail, curious. In the novel both Sebastian and Julia are dark. Their extreme likeness to one another is regularly referred to—a fact which is intended to make Julia an obvious Sebastian surrogate. But in the series Sebastian (Anthony Andrews) is blond and Julia (Diana Quick) is dark. Why, I wonder. It seems a stupid oversight.
Otherwise one can only applaud. The acting is of a uniformly high standard. Anthony Andrews gives the performance of his life as Sebastian, the locations—Oxford, Venice, Castle Howard—are superb, and there’s a classic John Gielgud cameo as Charles’s eccentric father. The first episode is being shown on Monday 12 October. Despite all the problems, well worth watching.
1981
Brideshead Revisited (2)
In the final episode of Brideshead Revisited Charles Ryder and Julia sit on the steps in the enormous house and agree to part. They’re both weeping and generally inarticulate, but one of the “broken sentences” Charles manages to mutter between stifled sobs is “So long to say so little.” It could serve quite nicely for the last word on this paradoxically compelling serial. Rather like the book itself, I suspect that it was the first half that got us watching the second. The departure of Sebastian, leaving centre stage to Charles Ryder, consigned most of the final episodes to a level of infuriating dullness. It’s a foreseeable defect, but one which scriptwriter John Mortimer seemed reluctant to avoid.
There’s been much talk of Mortimer’s faithfulness to the text, but in changing medium—from novel to TV series—such commendable rectitude can often be technically inept if not wrong-headed. This was particularly evident in episode six, where Julia is finally led on stage. Almost the entire episode was a sepia flashback of the courtship of Rex Mot-tram. In the book this largely takes the form of straightforward reported speech, but there are also some pages of direct conversation — post facto reminiscence by Julia and Charles. This is a clumsy device in the novel, but on the screen it comes across as sheer thoughtlessness. The voiceover renditions of this dialogue, and the clear intimacy that the interlocutors share, effectively deprive the forthcoming Charles/Julia romance of any vestige of suspense. We know from the very outset of Julia’s appearance, while we’re still in the process of learning about her and Rex, that she and Charles will end up together. One minute Charles is an art student in Paris, then suddenly we’re presented with a view of him on an ocean liner arm in arm with Julia. To someone who doesn’t know the book such methods of moving the story on must appear bafflingly amateurish.
Mortimer, of course, is simply reproducing Waugh’s own struggles with the plot, and to that extent is blameless. But, while Mortimer’s adaptation is by and large unobtrusive, he can’t entirely escape responsibility as he does occasionally contribute material of his own.
The most notable expansion has been of the General Strike episode. The strike, and the party Charles and Boy Mulcaster go to while it’s on, occupy some five and a half pages in the novel. In the serial these peripheral events took up an entire episode. The party scenes in particular had to be supplied almost entirely by Mortimer. This isn’t a bad thing; in fact these scenes were amusing and entertaining. The point is that if you can take these sort of liberties with the text on one occasion, then there are no grounds for not taking them on others, and the excuse of “scrupulous adherence” is no longer viable.
This takes us on to another area where Mortimer’s script has to bear some of the blame: dialogue. Because, in the novel, Waugh has selected first person narration, he finds himself having to get other characters to tell Charles various facts in order to fill in gaps in his—the narrator’s—knowledge. Waugh does this by allowing these other characters very lengthy uninterrupted monologues. A good example is provided by Cordelia telling Charles, over several pages, of Sebastian’s fate. Now, this only just works on the page. On the screen it seems almost a wilful breach of the conventions of realism. Film is an omniscient style of narration, the technical requirements of restricted point-of-view don’t apply, we’re not—in other words—inhabiting Charles Ryder’s consciousness. Where the whole thing broke down was in maintaining these monologues on the screen. Just because Charles doesn’t interject in the book didn’t mean that, in the realistic world of the TV serial, he had to keep a similar silence. He never said a word. Never said “Mmmm” or “I see” or “You’ve got a point there.” The camera frequently cut to him but all you got was a soulful look.
This had a further consequence as well as the irritation it gave rise to. Jeremy Irons as Charles had a difficult task. Charles Ryder is a typically dull Waugh narrator figure, like Tony Last in A Handful of Dust and Guy Crouchback in The Sword of Honour trilogy. But, somehow, Irons has contrived to make him more pompous and unlikeable than he is in the book. This is partly to do with his persistent non-participation in conversations but it’s also to do with Irons’s interpretation of Charles’s character, his repertoire of weak smiles and pursed lips. By the end of the serial I found Charles intensely off-putting, a sidling, supercilious creep, his cigarette daintily poised between thumb and forefinger. This may have been deliberate; it certainly makes Julia’s rejection of him at the end eminently comprehensible. But it also had more ironic side effects. In comparison to Irons’s Charles, Waugh’s villains—Julia (his wife), Rex Mottram and even Hooper—appear warm and sympathetic. Julia may be silly and materialistic but it’s very hard to sanction Charles’s treatment of her, let alone his callous disregard for his children. Even in the book this comes across as something of a puzzle, but in the serial it looks almost like a deliberate attempt to alienate the audience from Charles.
Curiously, though, the vast amount of criticism the serial has generated is a tribute to the overall success of the venture. It has provoked persistent debate and controversy at all levels and on all manner of topics, which is no mean achievement after all, and should be a source of genuine satisfaction to those who participated in the project.
It’s most lasting effect is a comprehensive and timely reassessment of the novel itself and the position it occupies in the Waugh canon. It’s surely clear now that Brideshead Revisited represents an aberration, a lapse. More kindly, perhaps, it can be seen as an unsuccessful prototype, a false start on themes tackled more skilfully in Waugh’s greatest achievement The Sword of Honour. The next challenge?
1981
The Falklands War (1)
The compelling drama surrounding the “War of the Falkland Islands,” or whatever it will come to be known as, made most of the week’s television seem nugatory—or, to put it in a more charitable way, highlighted its essentially artificial and fictive nature. Radio won the day, however, with its live transmission of the emergency parliamentary debate on Saturday morning. If there was ever a time when one wished TV cameras had been allowed into the House of Commons, this was surely it. Equally astonishing was the blare of xenophobic, jingoistic sentiment that erupted. It was an unsettling experience seeing the bellicose clichés being dusted off and reading the trumpeting headlines and leaders in the national press. This must have been what it was like before the Crimea, the Boer War or 1914, one thought bemusedly. Edward Du Cann’s absurd but surely to be immortalized assertion about the impossibly stretched lines of communication summed it all up: “I don’t remember Wellington whining on about T
orres Vedras,” he said with no trace of irony. Yet we were whizzing further back through time by Monday morning as an ITN Special Report brought us the departure of the Invincible and the Hermes for the South Atlantic. “There’s a curiously seventeenth-century atmosphere about Portsmouth today,” the reporter opined. Sir Francis Drake and the Armada were regularly alluded to. However, the irate gung-ho spirit seemed to have subsided to a degree. The analyses offered by various experts were in a tone that seemed to imply a faintly unreal air about the whole undertaking. Were we really sailing off to wage war against the Argentinians? Were these prognoses about the superiority of the British Fleet, for once, not part of some hypothetical war game?
And yet the crowds packed the quayside, there was cheering and flag-waving as our gallant boys sailed off to do battle with the foe. The most alarming aspect of all the multitude of words so far expended is that comparatively few of them have been concerned with the actual fate that may greet these servicemen. “People will get hurt” appears at the moment to be the favourite euphemism for “killed and maimed.” “I’m afraid people get hurt in war,” was John Nott’s variation during a commendably vigorous and aggressive interview by Brian Walden on Weekend World (LWT), as if he were talking about pulled muscles or tennis elbow. Once again the bleak sense of déjá vu descended: images of chateau-dwelling, claret-swilling generals during the First World War, staff officers planning strategy hundreds of miles from the front line. The front line in this particular case looks like being halfway round the world. If I were a naval rating on HMS Invincible I would feel very uneasy about what I was being asked to do.
But then that’s not a characteristic response from people who volunteer to join the armed forces. This fact was made evident by a coincidental repeat of The Woolridge View (BBC2) about the Navy fieldgun teams which participate in the Royal Tournament. Here men volunteered to “learn to withstand unreasonable physical pain” within a training regime whose working conditions were blind obedience to the unbelievably tyrannical discipline of the NCO coaches. These men mercilessly knock their teams into shape. “Once fit,” a coach boasted, “they become beasts.” I suppose at this point one should growl “Look out Argentina,” but on reflection—not much required—it seems demeaning and sad. Clearly there’s nothing terribly sinister about it being applied to sport, but, equally clearly, one knows that these same values on display are intended to function on the battlefield as well.
1982
The Falklands War (2)
Shortly after the Falklands War I made two predictions in this column. One was right and the other was wrong. The first was that the journalists would have large axes to grind and deep grudges to settle over the treatment they had received. The second was that when the reels of film finally came back with the cameramen and reporters the visual record of the war would be transformed, that, finally rid of the MOD minders and government censorship, we’d get to see the pictures that had been denied us. “There should be,” I said, “some fascinating documentaries.”
Well, I was wrong. The Falklands documentaries and videos have established that what we saw at the time—albeit two weeks late—is all we’re going to get. That it was a naive assumption to think otherwise was made clear on Panorama (BBC1) in an excellent and informative programme on the astonishing hamstringing that the media experienced.
The main argument against unrestricted reporting of a war is that any information made available to the public is of value to the enemy. This is manifestly true in the case of military operations. “Eisenhower announces date of D-Day invasion” would not have been the kind of headline calculated to win friends among the armed forces, and no one, not even the most passionate advocate of a free press, would expect this sort of information to be made open. On the Panorama programme various top brass and the editor of the Daily Telegraph made exactly this point. This would have been fair and just if the practice at the time had been even approximate to this ground rule. But the mare’s nest of crossed lines, ambivalences, duplicities, disinformation and plain lying made the excuse of preserving military secrets a ludicrous sham.
The best example of this was the Goose Green leak when the World Service announced that the paratroops were advancing on the settlement, as indeed they were. The understandable wrath of the men on the ground was directed at the quislings of the BBC when in actual fact the information had been provided by a “senior government official” keen to provide some “good news.” Not, in any event, that it would have been difficult for the Argentinians to have drawn the conclusion that Goose Green was a key target. One of the more curious assumptions of the MOD’s case is that the enemy is extremely stupid and can only base his strategic and tactical decisions on what he happens to read in the newspapers.
It was Churchill who coined the phrase “in war the truth is so important that it must be protected by a bodyguard of lies.” The aptness of this saw is very confined. Give it a general frame of reference and its aphoristic certainties conceal a more sinister import. As one of the news editors perceptively remarked, this sort of media manipulation possesses only short-term advantages, but in the longer term its consequences can be far from beneficial for the perpetrators. It’s clear that from now on a deep cynicism and profound suspicion will colour the relationship between the press and the MOD. It won’t be a bad thing if some of that rubs off on the public.
But will it? Most of the truth about the Falklands will emerge eventually. Some books are already telling us facts we didn’t know before, certain reporters are re-filing the “missing” dispatches. But they will be read by only a fraction of those who were tuned in to the news and reading the newspapers at the time.
And the MOD and the government will no doubt claim that this Panorama programme was biased. Of course it was and correctly so. The gags have been removed and the media have made a convincing case against the government’s manipulation of the news to suit its ad hoc political motives and ambitions. The ball is now in its court. But I suspect that the response will be “not available for comment.”
1982
The Falklands War (3)
Those Tory MPs dismayed by Archbishop Runcie’s lack of gung-ho spirit over our Great Victory in the Falklands will be able to console themselves with reruns of the first major documentary to have emerged from the conflict: BBC1’s eight-part Task Force South. Here was a chance, one thought, to get things straight, to produce an account of the war under conditions where accusations of aiding and abetting the enemy and lowering national morale need no longer apply. And, what’s more, under circumstances that should be a gift to your average documentary maker, namely an eager public who sensed there was more to be told and, perhaps most valuable, a public who, if not well informed, was at least cognizant of all the major facts, geography, names of key personalities, etc.
So why was Task Force South—or at least the two episodes we saw last week—so wretchedly bland, almost insultingly simple in its tone and approach? It was as if a decision had been taken not to make the thing too complicated, as if it were aimed at an intermediate class of foreign language students—a teaching aid in an “O” level course on contemporary British history. There was a lot of skilful editing on show and for much of the time the pictures were allowed to tell their own story, but the narration—supplied by Richard Baker and Brian Hanrahan—and the editorial approach seemed studiously inoffensive and pussyfooting. There was a notable absence of comment over the Carrington resignation and the merest nod at Al Haig’s furious shuttling. Both those topics, I’ll concede, are particularly gamey cans of worms, and I dare say that it could be argued that even lifting the lid for a second or two could eat into time that could be more profitably used elsewhere: but some indication of the complexities and controversies surrounding them was definitely required. Thus far at least, it doesn’t seem to be forthcoming.
The first two programmes dealt with the initial days of the crisis and the dispatch of the fleet and here, it seemed to me, was another manif
est lapse. The fact that there was a deal of jubilant unreflecting patriotism in the air at the time was incontrovertible and was clearly established by the pictures. But the narration failed to comment on the illusory nature of this elation or display any of the sobering but necessary ironies with which hindsight has now provided us. The most remarkable phenomenon of the early days of the crisis was exactly this dangerous self-delusion about the nature of war that appeared to have almost the entire country in its chilling grip. The prime function of any programme dealing with those heady days in April should be first to point out and highlight the cruel absurdities of the “Stick it up your junta” spirit and then do its utmost to eradicate any residual traces. There is no sign of that happening at the moment in Task Force South.
1982
People and Places
This is a catch-all title to enable me to include articles I’ve written that often have a bearing—sometimes remote—on books I have published or the release of films I have written. Both my essays on the British “Caff” and minicabs, for example, were designed to promote, first, my novel Armadillo and then the broadcast of my three-part adaptation of it on the BBC. More and more the publication of a book seems to involve the author in all manner of ancillary journalism. The advantage of this, however, is that the article can be more uncompromising, and to the point: the necessary finesse involved in slipping hard facts into a work of fiction is not required. In this kind of journalism polemic overrules disinterestedness: a case has to be made as entertainingly as possible and sometimes that motive is exhilarating.