OUR CONCEPT of the monastic life does not encompass monks’ making fun of their abbot — or, at least, not to his face — and I suspect that our Western Christian tradition would consider that, when the “Father-in-God” put on his ceremonial headgear to welcome the most holy visitor imaginable, for the whole community to break up in laughter would be a total dereliction of the respect owing to the religious life.
How refreshing, then, to find that Tibetan Buddhist monks have no such scruples. A Year in Tibet (BBC4, Thursday of last week) is a new series that bills itself as telling the story of “ordinary people in an extraordinary place”, and it is worth noting that Buddhist monks can quite easily be considered “ordinary people”.
As long as it is exotic, TV has no problem whatsoever in taking religion not only seriously but as a perfectly unremarkable aspect of life. But this first programme was less compelling than I had hoped: we never felt completely involved.
The most interesting strand was the preparation for the first visit of the Panchen Lama in 20 years. Half-forgotten storerooms were ransacked for the proper liturgical kit. Could anyone remember where that fitted? What was this supposed to be for?
This sequence will have resonated with churches up and down the land as we search desperately for the Passiontide veiling, and try to recall where we put the processional palm branches. At the level of liturgical props, there is a great commonality among all religions.
Across the whole film lies the shadow of the Chinese occupation of Tibet, and it stated baldly that the Buddhist monasteries offered the biggest threat to Communism. How splendid that so serious a role can be combined with laughter and fun.
There was not much fun to be found in Rivers Of Blood (BBC2, Saturday), which, 40 years on, recounted Enoch Powell’s notorious speech on immigration and its aftermath. This was absorbing television, holding a mirror to our society as much today as then.
The evidence was quite plain: Mr Powell calculated carefully the effect of what he would say, deliberately undermining the consensus of his party (of which he was on the front bench) on the matter. The more clips we saw, the more it seemed that he sought the pillory: it was as though he longed to be driven into the political wilderness.
The fascinating thing is that he was far closer to the thinking of most of his constituents than the liberal consensus insisted on pretending, and the issues he raised — how a proper national identity should be nurtured, whether it needs to be protected, whether multiculturalism leads to segregation — are by no means cut and dried.
But his bleak, rabble-rousing rhetoric ensured that proper debate could not take place. The violence of those student protesters who were determined to smash up any debate in which he might take part was as unsavoury as the dockers’ marching to insist that “Enoch was right.”
The programme is part of the BBC’s White season, which examines, through dramas and documentaries, how much the traditional white working class has become an alienated and dispossessed minority. It is a topic of serious concern for our national Church.
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