TV Reviews : Evelyn Waugh’s ‘Scoop’ on PBS Skewers the Press

It’s hard to imagine, but in the mid-’30s the dilettantish Evelyn Waugh was a foreign correspondent sniffing out the news for London’s Daily Mail with a bunch of motley hacks and colleagues in remote Abyssinia (later renamed Ethiopia).

Waugh wrote a spoofy novel about his journalistic misadventures called “Scoop,” and a British “Masterpiece Theatre” production captures Waugh’s satiric edge Sunday (at 8 p.m. on Channel 24 and Channel 50, with Channel 28 airing the show next Saturday at 9 p.m.).

The sight of Waugh’s ragtag press corps trying to cover a civil war nobody understands in a backwater African outpost (the crew shot in Morocco) is a choice send-up of the Fourth Estate and a ripe satire of an all-powerful London daily newspaper publisher (a domineering, fatuous Donald Pleasence in top form) whose paper is called the London Beast and whose major rival is the London Brute.

The lark of a story begins with a case of mistaken identity triggered by a rich society beauty (Nicola Pagett) who is a classic Waugh elitist caricature. The result is something almost piquant. The hero (the Waugh alter-ego) is a gentle, tranquil nature columnist on the Beast (the gullible Michael Maloney) who is propelled from his dotty old family on a sylvan country estate into the heat and messiness of a foreign news assignment in a corrupt East African country.

There’s a wonderful performance by Denholm Elliott as a cringing, obsequious foreign editor, and Herbert Lom also shows up.

William Boyd’s adaptation and Gavin Millar’s direction capture Waugh’s spoof while also catching the light romantic tone of adventure literature.

The first hour is the strongest; momentum flags in the second hour primarily because the young hero’s moony tryst with an avaricious German woman undermines the show’s freshness.

Things pick up when the youth returns to England, his weird family of crones and the hilariously rattled Pleasence. Alistair Cooke’s graceful and insightful introductions are invariably helpful, but this one is especially good.