It was pleasant just to listen to his Glaswegian accent. “Like an orgy, one should always consider carefully if you’re really up to a night of voodoo,” he remarked in a flying visit to nocturnal rituals of the dead in New Orleans, “because if you’re not playing [a part in them], there’s a lot of sitting around.” And I thought at this stage that there’d been an awful lot of filming and not much more than a skim over the world of The Loved One, Evelyn Waugh’s satirical anatomy of Californian mortuary rites uprooted from cultural traditions.