Evelyn Waugh

A grand surprise arrived on Friday in the shape of Decline and Fall. It shouldn't, perhaps, have been that much of a surprise, given that the man responsible for adapting Evelyn Waugh's first published (and most splenetically Welsh-hating, liberal-baiting) novel was James Wood, also responsible for the ever-subtle Rev., and that the casting was able to plumb such glorious heights as Stephen Graham, Douglas Hodge, David Suchet and Eva Longoria.

For once, an adaptation caught Waugh's inner voice, that singular interwar fruity whine of pomp, self-pity and high intellect, the all leavened by an utterly redemptive sense of the absurdity of the human condition, particularly Waugh's own. Crucially, this was achieved without resort to the artifice of narrative voiceover, à la Brideshead. Wood just picked his quotes very cleverly. In episode one (of three), Jack Whitehall's beleaguered Everyman is sent down from Oxford (with an achingly unfair whiff of un-trouser-edness) and reduced to teaching in the boondocks, where every pupil is as damaged, yet at least 10 times as smart, as the masters. He soon alights on the ultimate piece of time-wasting for his spoilt charges, "an essay on self-indulgence. There will be points for the longest, irrespective of any possible merit."

There are the stock grotesques, yes - even Douglas Hodge, as the chief sot/pederast, doesn't get to chew the scenery with quite the liberated zest of David Suchet's headmaster, reacting to freedom from all those dreary Poirots as would a vampire released on virgin necks, toothily telling Whitehall's straight-bat ingenu that "we schoolmasters must temper discretion with... deceit" - but, by and large, this is happily grounded more in realism than caricature. What emerges is a true comic fantasy, yes, but also one which captures that dreadful damp twixt-war tristesse: a certain boredom with politics, a certain class obsession, an irresolute yet total anger at... something. An End of Days. This BBC production, in which all excel, is thrillingly timely, given our fractious nation's rude recent decision to Decline, and Flail, and also gives trembling hope that, finally, we might get a faithful rendition of the wisest funny novel of the 20th century, Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim.

Taking the Flak is Drop the Dead Donkey stuffed with Broadcast News and a wishful pinch of Evelyn Waugh's Scoop. Whenever television examines its own hubris, you tend to get more navel-gazing than forensic insight. Foreign newsgathering is a subject that's gagging for a good satiric seeing-to. This script came across like a string of well- sucked traveller's tales from the foreign desk. I have covered stories with news teams and, superficially, this was really not a million miles from the reality. But it suffered from what it was attempting to lampoon. It never looked beyond the obvious and went for the jokes that were easiest and simplest.

It was shot on location - when real life intervened, they had to flee from Kenya to Tanzania - but was set in an imaginary African country suffering a farcical civil war. The ineptitude, ruthlessness and crassness of the news teams might have been roughly authentic, but depicting this made-up nation as a tinpot comic turn of eye-rolling natives and Third World clichés really wasn't fair or funny. It's always Africa that's traduced as bongo-bongo land, never given the dignity of being a real place. African wars aren't funny. The suffering that, far too rarely, attracts the world's news isn't intrinsically amusing.

Neither can it be diminished to a backdrop for white men behaving badly, just as the danger journos put themselves in isn't imaginary or laughable. This series would have been brilliant had it not given up at the first sentence to mock the afflicted and traduce the brave, and had it, like Getting On, allowed the comedy to arise out of the pity and the stupidity. What this should have been was hard satire. What it was was racist farce.

"This ancient country, 38 times the size of Wales, is in desperate need." So begins BBC correspondent Harry Chambers' piece to camera from a central African republic at the start of this spoof on foreign news reporting. "It wouldn't take much to make a difference here," he adds, "A visit by Angelina Jolie or Fearne Cotton... perhaps even a simple, one-off drama by Richard Curtis." It's one of the better jokes in what turns out to be a rambling farce set under African skies - imagine Drop the Dead Donkey crossed with Evelyn Waugh's Scoop. Martin Jarvis is enjoyable as a John Simpson-style foreign editor who flies in to take over any story when it gets big enough, treading on the toes of local stringers like Harry. But Jarvis and the rest of the cast have to fight with a script that wobbles alarmingly. A running joke about a plump female reporter's troubled bowels is about as unfunny as comedy gets. There's a great satire to be made deconstructing the foibles of the news machine. Sadly, this isn't it.

Rory Kinnear squawked his way classily through an exuberant serialisation of Scoop, Evelyn Waugh's evergreen satire of journalism.

By some strange turn of fate the new Classic Serial is Scoop, Evelyn Waugh's satire on the press (its ownership, practices and function). The story is simple. We are in the 1930s. A mighty newspaper proprietor, Lord Copper, believes wars are good for countries because they unite people against a known enemy. He is persuaded by a beautiful society hostess to send one of her social pets, John Boot, to report the war in far-off Ishmaelia. By mistake, another Boot, William, who writes the Daily Beast's nature notebook, is dispatched. William knows nothing of abroad or reporting. We understand that, like Voltaire's Candide, he will somehow come out of this mess quite well and make us laugh a lot. Jeremy Front has done a deft, sly adaptation, bringing out the brilliance of the characters. Sally Avens has cast it very well (Rory Kinnear as William and Stephen Critchlow as Corker are perfect, David Warner as Lord Copper is pluperfect) and directs it with panache. A better antidote to hysteria cannot be imagined.

The clatter of typewriter keys and a blast of jazz open this energetic dramatisation of Evelyn Waugh's satirical novel about journalism in the 1930s. William Boot (Rory Kinnear) is an unambitious countryside columnist who, by mistake, is sent to report on the civil unrest in the fictional African state of Ishmaelia.

Once there, Boot meets Corker, a roguish news agency reporter - and owner of a treasured collection of Bakerlite elephants - who initiates Boot in the 'dark arts of Fleet Street'.

This production works hard to include as many of Waugh's wonderfully insane characters as possible, from the star correspondents who file moving accounts about uprisings that have never happened, to the African president who sends the hacks on a wild goose chase to a non-existent town. And the most ludicrous location? Popotakis's Ping-Pong Parlour.

Tim McInnerny, Rory Kinnear and David Warner lead an awesome cast in Jeremy Front's adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's classic newspaper satire.

The new Classic Serial is Evelyn Waugh's abidingly comic novel, adapted by clever Jeremy Front (who, among many other things, also does the Charles Paris mysteries on this network). Rory Kinnear plays William Boot, an obscure young country scribe mistaken by mighty newspaper publisher Lord Copper (David Warner) for urbane and experienced reporter John Boot and sent off to report on a war in far-off Ishmaelia. Boot, often thought to resemble the great Bill Deedes in his early days on Fleet Street, flounders out of his depth, gets much wrong but, in the wicked world which surrounds him, somehow shines through.