The Evelyn Waugh BBC Radio Drama Collection

Decline and Fall, Brideshead Revisited and Other Full-Cast Dramatisations

By: Evelyn Waugh, Jeremy Front

Narrated by: Anne-Marie Duff, Ben Miles, Emilia Fox, full cast, Kieran Hodgson, Paul Ready, Rory Kinnear, Tim McInnerny, Toby Jones, Tom Hollander

Evelyn Waugh is one of the pre-eminent English novelists of the 20th century. This collection comprises six of his finest works, dramatised by award-winning writer Jeremy Front.

Decline and Fall
Paul Pennyfeather, an earnest, scholarly Oxford student, knows nothing of 1920's high-life – until one night he encounters The Bollinger Club.... This darkly comic romp set in the early Jazz Age stars Kieran Hodgson, John Sessions, Emilia Fox and Tom Hollander.

Brideshead Revisited
During the Second World War, a disillusioned Captain Charles Ryder finds himself posted to Brideshead Castle: the scene of the happiest years of his life and the beginnings of his friendship with Sebastian Flyte. A classic tale of life, love and a forgotten era, starring Ben Miles, Jamie Bamber, Anne-Marie Duff and Toby Jones.

Scoop
Hapless journalist William Boot is mistakenly sent to report on a war in Africa, where he finds love and ends up in the middle of a revolution... Waugh’s celebrated satire of newspaper life stars Rory Kinnear and Tim McInnerny.

Sword of Honour (The Waugh Trilogy)
This three-part dramatisation of Waugh’s satirical masterpiece follows the comic adventures of Guy Crouchbank during World War II. In Men at Arms, Guy is scarred by a broken marriage and searching for a purpose to live. When war breaks out, he feels he may have at last found a cause worth fighting for. Officers and Gentlemen sees Guy sent home in disgrace following a misbegotten raid in Dakar. But his next posting takes him somewhere totally unexpected.... In Unconditional Surrender, Guy is beginning to lose his idealism about the war – but his military career is revived with selection for a mission to Italy.

Winner of Best Audio Drama (Adaptation) at the 2014 BBC Audio Drama Awards, this moving trilogy stars Paul Ready as Guy with Tim McInnerny as the Narrator, Tim Pigott-Smith as Brigadier Ritchie-Hook, Lee Ingleby as Trimmer and Lydia Leonard as Virginia.

Text copyright © Evelyn Waugh 1928 (Decline and Fall), 1938 (Scoop), 1945 (Brideshead Revisited), 1952 (Men at Arms), 1955 (Officers and Gentlemen), 1961 (Unconditional Surrender). All rights reserved.

Dramatised by Jeremy Front

First broadcast BBC Radio 4, 27 October-10 November 2013

©2020 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd (P)2020 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd

One of the best dramatizations I have listened to!

Wonderful production with many wonderful performances, and with such evocative music and songs of those times. I particularly enjoyed Rory Kinnear's performance in "Scoop" and Paul Ready's in the "Sword of Honour" trilogy, but there are many other excellent performances as well. I have enjoyed many radio dramatizations from the BBC, and this is one I will cherish and listen to many times.

Almost a WWII anthology...

Waugh is dead serious writer. His satire is sombre, his lightest jibes leave scars, and his quips have heft. He delivers subtext through peripheral characters and his protagonists are often unwordly, even artless.
On the page, a Waugh hero can almost be viewed as a sacrificial lamb; we care for them from the start and wish we could ring them up and say "look, this is a Waugh story, you're headed towards a life-altering loss of innocence, read some Schopenhauer or something before you leave the house..." But a Waugh character would only offer a few polite words of appreciation and gently recradle the phone. Imbued with optimism, faith in humanity, and unerring decency, a Waugh character sallies forth...

An audible Waugh character casts a more complex shadow, particularly in a first rate production. And these are first rate productions - absolutely stellar.

Audible Waugh characters at war, at least for me, do not delight. I could not engage, couldn't keep up with the characters, and everything seemed soaked in testosterone and cynicism. It's astonishing in a way - familiar and well loved words rendered too potent for comfort when heard.

...so the second half of this collection felt oppressive, claustrophobic, even turgid at times. I am setting it aside for now and I will try again.

If you're not keen on Waugh's war stories, or indeed any war stories, this might not be the collection for you.

For those who are, you won't find better....