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The new movie of 'Brideshead Revisited' camps up the relationship between Charles and Sebastian, misunderstands Waugh's world of class and social nuance and paints a risible picture of English Catholicism. It does a great disservice to the novel and is grossly inferior to the 1981 mini-series, writes Eileen Battersby.

IT NEVER sounded like a good idea, or even necessary. Remakes have a tendency to end up like crumpled, patched-together second-hand suits or worse still, resemble that cruel habit of bringing champion racehorses out of retirement for the inevitable tragedy - death on the track. From the earliest mentions of a forthcoming film version of Evelyn Waugh's iconic novel, Brideshead Revisited, the reaction was almost uniformly "Why?" Why attempt a condensed film version of a novel that had been so brilliantly well-served by Granada TV's equally iconic, seminal, 11-part series?