Bona Brideshead

I was amazed to discover the other day that you can see all of the classic 80's TV series Brideshead Revisited online and legitimately for free at http://www.itv.com/BestofITV/perioddrama/bridesheadrevisited/default.html

I've started watching it and Sebastian and Charles are certainly a lot camper than I remembered; "naughtiness high on the catalogue of grave sins" indeed.

I'm likely to need to create a drinking game to go with it if I'm to struggle through the rest. There's plenty of inspiration:


Come with me now to the Evelyn Waugh/Round the Horne mash-up that the world didn't know it was waiting for:

a string quartet plays

CHARLES RYDER: But I was in search of love in those days, and I went full of curiousity and the faint, unrecognized apprehension that here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey city ....... beyond a sign that promised "Bona Gardens".

JULIAN (screaming): Ooh hello Mr Ryder, I'm Julian and this is my friend Sandy.
SANDY(also screaming): Ooh hello. No Sebastian today, no Aloisius?
JULIAN: Old delicious and his Aloisious!
SANDY: Oy stifle yourself! Isn't he bold Mr Ryder? Ain't he bold!
JULIAN: Now let's have a vada at this garden.
RYDER: It's through here.. .
JULIAN: Yes, you have your Florentine marble
SANDY: Comes lovely in Florentine marble
JULIAN: Or you have your ceramics.
SANDY: Oh, fab ceramics - all hand done by a disciple of William Morris in Ladbroke Grove.0r, Jules, wait a minute, how do you see his patio?
JULIAN: Don't rush me, don't rush me - it's beginning come over me in waves. I see it as a miniature version of the piazza in Florence.
SANDY: Oh, it's a breakthrough! Mr. Ryder, he's broken through. No - no - wait a minute - no - it won't work -

RYDER: Perhaps it won't work because all our loves are merely hints and symbols; vagabond-language scrawled on gate-posts and paving-stones along the weary road that others have tramped before us; perhaps you and I are types and this sadness which sometimes falls between us springs from disappointment in our search, each straining through and beyond the other, snatching a glimpse now and then of the shadow which turns the corner always a pace or two ahead of us.

PRODNOSE: But then again, perhaps not.

MYSELF: Ooh bold!