I didn't want to see this adaptation anyway but now I'm starting to feel queasy every time I read another review... Here's what the Telegraph had to say:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/07/28/do2802.xml

Thanks for posting this. The comments underneath are comical. I read somewhere that the Americans were upset because all the limousines, endless dinners with ancestral plate and activities like punting on the river, etc were left out.

Sheila

You would think they would know when to leave well alone?

The original series was so of its time? When we all still believed in 'this is the stuff of which fairy tales are made' and all that?

And how could you possibly improve on the original cast? Gielgud and Olivier?

Sarah

But Evelyn Waugh didn't mean to give the impression these people were all so wonderful. His other books about the aristocracy are all very dark. They just edit out the critical parts in films.

Sheila

Sorry - that last was a bit misleading - I know the novel is quite dark but the series had a lavish glamour and a glitter to it that I think was very much a part of the time in which it was made? 1981 - royal wedding and all that?

Before they felt they had to apologise for the aristos like the later Mitford series?

Arguably the series was very much the John Mortimer version of Waugh - and brilliant for that?

(Interesting the friendship - mostly by correspondence - between Mitford and Waugh and how he was always trying to get her to write more 'seriously'?)

Sarah