Revisiting Brideshead with Charles Sturridge

Revisiting Brideshead with Charles Sturridge

Multi-award winning director and writer Charles Sturridge brings the extraordinary inside story behind the making of Granada TV’s sumptuous adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited to Bridport Arts Centre.

Using selected clips and unseen footage, Charles will explain how ten days after being offered the job he was on set directing a cast that included Jeremy Irons, Anthony Andrews, Diana Quick, Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud and after 42 weeks shooting, interrupted when it’s leading man went off to make another film, went on to deliver a twelve hour film series with an iconic score by Geoffrey Burgon which established itself as one of British Television’s most enduring successes. He says: Brideshead was made under a cover of continual crisis which allowed those of us at the centre of the storm a calm and astonishingly free space to work’.

Twenty years later in 2010, Brideshead was placed second in The Guardian’s list of The Top 50 TV dramas of all time and in 2015, it topped the Daily Telegraph’s list of ‘Greatest Television Adaptations: “Brideshead Revisited is television’s greatest literary adaptation, bar none. It’s utterly faithful to Evelyn Waugh’s novel yet it’s somehow more than that, too.”

Charles Sturridge will conclude the evening with an opportunity for questions from the audience.

Charles is very generously giving his time in support of Bridport Arts Centre’s Come Together campaign to raise urgently needed funds for the building.

406357