Jack Whitehall

Evelyn Waugh's picaresque farce continues, as the hapless Paul Pennyfeather (a nicely cast Jack Whitehall) is hired to tutor the son of wealthy socialite widow Margot Beste-Chetwynde (the divine Eva Longoria). Before long, his heart has melted all over her embroidered frock - but there's a love rival in the shape of preposterous German architect Otto ("I love her body as much as concrete"). And is Margot's international cabaret business all it seems.

After a tiny rest stop, a new series of well-rehearsed and lightly promotional chat begins. Jack Whitehall, very much the gift that keeps on giving on the red sofa, returns yet again - this time to discuss his current, and slightly underwhelming, starring role in BBC One's Decline and Fall. Operating at about the same level of old pro is the duo of Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman, here to plug pensioner heist movie Going in Style.

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.

Interview: Jack Whitehall

Jack Whitehall is nothing like Jack Whitehall.

Decline and Fall review

A riotously successful adaptation. Evelyn Waugh brilliantly brought to BBC One with Jack Whitehall and Eva Longoria.

Decline and Fall review

The ghastly gaggle of toffs are back with Jack Whitehall as the perfect Pennyweather and Eva Longoria bringing the glamour in this excellent companion to Evelyn Waugh's classic novel.

Decline And Fall review

Imagine such a bygone world where someone would get a job they are ill-suited for, simply because they are posh. How foolish! Still, it will be interesting to see how George Osborne's London Evening Standard reviews the new BBC One adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's stinging social satire Decline And Fall.

Jack Whitehall interview

Jack Whitehall on scandal, public school privilege and new BBC drama Decline And Fall.

Decline and Fall: great performances but book is better

Ben Dowell finds that new BBC TV version of Evelyn Waugh's 1928 classic, starring Jack Whitehall, misses much of the joy and brilliance of the book. But did it ever have a chance of measuring up?

Decline and Fall review

Decline and Fall is a Waugh adaptation to stand comparison with the pater of them all.