A smug and potentially alienating bit of nostalgia: Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews in Brideshead Revisited. Photograph: ITV
So Brideshead Revisited is to be made available through iTunes. You'll excuse me if I don't drop my chips with excitement. I don't remember it the first time round in 1981 (I think I was preoccupied with Sapphire and Steel and Doctor Who at that point) but I did watch it (on video!) in 2001 as part of a feature focused on whether the "golden age" of television really was so shiny. Obviously, I wasn't impressed - and not just because I was a snotty 26 year-old at the time. I watched it again recently (don't ask) and was again struck by the protracted pace, self-satisfied air and barely concealed nostalgia for a time and milieu that was as far from its audience's world as if it were an alien planet. It certainly wasn't watched in our house because it seemed so utterly irrelevant.
While some of the above can be attributed to the chip I have on my shoulder on account of being Scottish and of peasant stock, not all of it can be dismissed so easily. John Mortimer's take on Waugh's novel wasn't so much an adaptation as a slideshow to accompany a novel - a really long novel - and it got such a big audience because, in part, there was little else to watch.
Moreover, Brideshead Revisited is a symbol of an age when TV was run, not with the viewer in mind, but as some giant post-Oxbridge job creation scheme. Plus ça change, you might think - especially in its upper echelons - but there's no doubting that television is now more demotic than ever - in the lives it portrays and with regard to those who make it too.
Today, you could persuasively argue that drama producers and broadcasters are far too obsessed with viewers - and more specifically viewing figures, especially at the BBC - and now simply don't show the vision that they should. That's true. I tell you what isn't true though - that Brideshead Revisited is somehow an untouchable treasure from a "golden age"
Giving the drama its due, it tackled universal subjects such as love and loss, albeit in an exclusive setting, and programme makers would give their eye teeth to have the luxury of time and budget that the drama was afforded. But Brideshead has lost its lustre over the years - if it had any to begin with. Or am I being churlish? (Yes or no will suffice, if you don't want to engage further).
