Brideshead Revisited (25th Anniversary Collector's Edition)
December 2006 Reviewed by: Charlotte Meyer Format: DVD	(all ratings out of 5): Overall Enjoyment Picture Quality Packaged Extras Sound Quality

To revisit Brideshead Revisited after 25 years is to see it with new eyes. Since its production, much has changed in our culture and in television technology. In 1981, this 11-episode series was so spellbinding that millions wouldn’t miss it -- no TiVo back then. It created a fad return to the styles of the decadent 1930s, and the theme from the score made the Top 40. Those were simpler days, when we had only four channels and we tolerated, even relished, a narrative pace this languid.

In the role that launched his career, Jeremy Irons plays Charles Ryder, a middle-class student at Oxford who falls under the sway of the aristocratic Sebastian (Anthony Andrews), profligate son of Lord and Lady Marchmain, (Laurence Olivier and Claire Bloom). Much like author Evelyn Waugh himself, Charles Ryder is fascinated by the very rich. Leaping his own class, Ryder becomes a regular visitor to the Marchmains’ great ancestral estate, Brideshead. He is a puzzled observer of the strict Catholicism enforced by Lady Marchmain. It rules -- and ruins -- the lives of Sebastian and his sister Julia (Diana Quick), and it puts Ryder himself out in the cold. After Sebastian escapes to Morocco for a life of homosexuality and alcohol, Charles becomes engaged to Julia. But because they have both been married before, Julia abruptly breaks it off and makes a guilty return to Catholicism.

The opening episode is Charles’ return by chance to Brideshead 20 years later at the outbreak of World War II. He is an officer, lonely and disillusioned, leading his company to bivouac there. The story then emerges in his memory as an elaborate, compelling flashback.

Brideshead is actually Castle Howard, a lavish estate in Yorkshire. Eight other shooting locations, each described in an informative Companion Guide, include Oxford, Venice, Malta, and the QE2 in a storm on the Atlantic Ocean. It took two years to produce the series: these multiple locations, a four-month technicians’ strike, a change in the director, and a steady need to enlarge the script explain why. We learn these details and many more in a very fine 50-minute documentary that follows episode 1. It includes insightful analyses of the story by various critics, lots of relevant biography of Evelyn Waugh, comments on the score, the sets, the costumes -- all delicious tidbits for anyone hungry for more.

The quality of the video itself is explained in a text-only featurette. In truth its colors are faded and it lacks the precise, clear images to which we have grown accustomed. But we forgive all, once we learn its history. The series had been shot in 16mm film. Each day the editor looked at a live transmission of the film print. The DVD was produced from that much-handled, 22-year-old print. Once transferred to digital and color correction applied, it had to be cleaned. Frame by frame, 8000 bits of dirt were digitally removed by hand by operators so painstaking, we are told, that "we may have one less bird in the sky in Venice." The soundtrack was remastered by running it through modern mixing techniques to produce a "stereo effect." It’s still often hard to make out dialogue, British accents notwithstanding.

Nevertheless, the vintage feel of the DVD somehow seems right. When it was made in the 1980s, it was full of nostalgia for the 1930s. Today it evokes nostalgia for the 1980s as well, a time when television still united us around a long, well-told, well-made story.

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