WE SALUTE the BBC for devoting a whole new series to celebrating yet another contribution to human happiness that can be directly attributed to the inspiration and endeavours of Anglican clerics.
From its title, you might expect The Worlds of Fantasy (BBC4, Wednesday of last week) to be a rationalistic attack on our prime vocation of peddling religion, but in fact it is a three-part account of the genre of fantasy fiction, kicking off by considering those novels that set a child at the centre of their imaginary world.
Here, the Revds set an unassailable lead, following up The Water Babies with Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. There is something of a problem with classification here: Kingsley’s book is a scathing attack on the cruelty of contemporary child labour, while Dodgson’s masterpiece is less fantasy than nonsense — but nonsense with a backbone of inverted logic and wholehearted fun at the expense of Victorian middle-class culture.
I prefer to think of Alice as the inspiration behind the surrealism and psychoanalysis rather than being, as this programme described, the founding father of a progeny whose latest and greatest descendant is the dire Harry Potter series.
For once, the talking heads — a line-up of authors and critics — actually knew what they were talking about. Childhood innocence was the most significant theme, as the pendulum swung between the child as representing that pre-lapsarian state to which we all long to return, or instead the young Limb of Satan, unencumbered with the adult burden of self-knowledge and moral guilt.
Anglican religion did not just make a starring appearance in the first act: it kept cropping up. The Narnia books by C. S. Lewis received, on the whole, a critical kicking, its Christian substructure undercutting its value as a work of fiction (a view that I share), while the most overtly gospel-based comments came, bizarrely, from Philip Pullman, the scourge of Christianity, whose anti-theism always seems to me to have an eradicably Anglican tinge.
As our parish contains one, whose denizens from time to time share unobtrusively in our divine worship, I thought I should watch an episode of The Palace (ITV1, Mondays) to find out what really goes on inside a royal residence.
The plot is tricky to unravel at this late stage, but I gathered that a new King of England, trying to take his new responsibilities seriously while hanging on to shreds of youthful freedom, is secretly undermined by his wicked elder sister, who would have been monarch if only she were male. His younger brother is a feckless Hooray Henry; his younger sister attempted to renounce her royal status. These pressing issues must be resolved before the impending coronation (preparations and rehearsals for which take up a suspiciously minor — that is, non-existent — chunk of the royal diary).
All this is a played out within the context of plots and stratagems by the courtiers, PAs, and officials who surround and cocoon them.
Perhaps I should clarify that this is a vaguely comic drama, not a documentary. High churchmen, however, will derive great pleasure from observing the various liveries and costumes of the servants.
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