Brideshead Revisited - References in Other Media

References in Other Media

In scene 2 of Tom Stoppard's 1993 play Arcadia, one character refers to another character who attends Oxford as "Brideshead Regurgitated." Et in Arcadia ego, the Latin phrase which is the title of the major section (Book One) of Brideshead Revisited, is also a central theme to Tom Stoppard's play. Stoppard's phrase may have been inspired by the 1980s BBC comedy series "Three of a Kind", starring Tracey Ullman, Lenny Henry and David Copperfield, which featured a recurring sketch entitled "Brideshead Regurgitated", with Henry in the role of Charles Ryder.

In the early 1980s, following the release of the television series, the Australian Broadcasting Commission (from 1983, Australian Broadcasting Corporation) produced a radio show called Brunswick Heads Revisited. Brunswick Heads is a coastal town in northern New South Wales. The series was a spoof, and made fun of the 'Englishness' of Brideshead and many amusing parallels could be drawn between the upper class characters from Brideshead and their opposite numbers from rural Australia.

Paula Byrne's biography of Evelyn Waugh, titled Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead, was published by HarperPress in the UK in August 2009 and HarperCollins New York in the USA in April 2010. An excerpt was published in the Sunday Times 9 August 2009 under the headline "Sex Scandal Behind 'Brideshead Revisited'". The book concerns Lord Beauchamp, who was the father of Waugh's friend Hugh Lygon. Its stated thesis is "that the exiled Lord Marchmain was a version of Boom and Lady Marchmain of the Countess Beauchamp, that the dissolute Sebastian Flyte was Hugh and other Lygon siblings matched other roles." The book, which Byrne describes in the preface as a "partial life," identifies other real-life bases for events and characters in Waugh's novel, though Byrne argues carefully against simple one-to-one correspondences, suggesting instead that Waugh combined people, places and events into composite inventions, subtle transmutations of life into fiction. An illustrated extract appeared in the April 2010 issue of Vanity Fair in advance of American publication.