Brandy alexander

[vaneramos]

In my favourite TV miniseries, Brideshead Revisited, Anthony Blanche attempts to seduce the protagonist with four glasses of brandy alexander, two for each. Charles Ryder (the role that launched Jeremy Irons' career) does not like the drink, but I do. It's good seasonal cheer: one-and-a-half ounces of brandy, one ounce of creme de cacao, and one ounce of heavy cream, shaken with cracked ice. When Ryder demures, the outrageous Blanche promptly swallows all four.

A couple Blanche-isms from the series:

My affair with the Duchess of V was on an altogether higher plane than any of you h-?-s c-can conceive. Do you know what it was that cemented our love? We used the same coloured varnish for our toenails.

After a gay-bashing incident:

I didn't w-want them to start getting rough, so I s-said to them pacifically, "D-dear sweet clodhoppers, if you knew anything of s-sexual psychology you would know that nothing could give me keener pleasure than to be m-manhandled by you meaty boys. Ecstasy of the naughtiest kind. If one of you wishes to be my p-partner in joy then c-come and sieze me. If, on the other hand, you wish to satisfy some obscure and l-less easily c-classified libido then c-come with me quietly to the water."

Comments

[robearal.livejournal.com]

Watching a couple episodes of that series in the 70s brought certain "feelings" to the fore.

I, too, am supposed to be a member of the Idle Rich living on an estate like that.

Boffing men.

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

Ha!

I identify all to well with some of Sebastian's sentiments about his family.

It actually came out in 1981.

[furrbear.livejournal.com]

Ah, yes. The fountain dunking. Still one of the best British TV productions to make it to this continent. Wonderful soundtrack.

I think the story is one of Waugh's best. My favorite passage is Charles' comments near the beginning where he talks of the low door to the secret garden. Now I need to go look it up.

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

I loved that passage, too. In fact I scribbled it down tonight, also, it just didn't fit the levity of this post. I was saving it for another time, but you asked for it!

I went then uncertainly for it was foreign ground and there was a tiny, priggish warning voice in my ear which, in the tones of Collins, told me it was seemly to hold back. But I was in search of love in those days and I went full of curiosity and a faint unrecognized apprehension that here at last I should find that low door in the wall others I knew had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden which was somewhere not overlooked by any window in the heart of that grey city.

Just beautiful writing! And how it spoke to my own repressed desires at the age of 17 or 18 when it aired on this continent.

[leafshimmer.livejournal.com]

I love those scenes with the divine Nickolas Grace as the *other* Blanche (other than Dubois, I intend--"It means White Wood.") Unfortunately the last time I tried to watch the entire series, I found that it slithered into a noxious puddle of country-house crypto-Catholic sentimentality about halfway through. I found myself feeling sorry for Diana Quick for some of the dialogue and emotions she is made to act in some of those later episodes.

Claire Bloom was brilliant as Mama Brideshead. Remember Antony's line about how she left tooth marks on her young? LOVE IT.

[leafshimmer.livejournal.com]

Oh, I don't mean to say that I don't find Julia believable. It's all very plausible. It just makes me gag.

The thing with Anthony Blanche is that he's presented as this over-the-top freak, but you realize towards the end that everything he's said to Charles in those early scenes is TRUE.

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

Here's something else I posted about Brideshead Revisited more than 18 months ago. It's interesting how my perception of my parents has improved in that time, and yet I still feel lost like Sebastian at times.