THE Battle For Britain’s Soul (BBC2, Tues) — a series charting our
post-Reformation history of religion — is the BBC’s grand statement that it
Still Takes Christianity Seriously. Unfortunately, "serious" is just about the
last thing of which it can be accused.
Its presenter, the Revd Peter Owen-Jones, is determined to overturn
everyone’s preconception of a sober, boring, dull vicar. Striding around in
boots and unbuttoned cassock, sporting his fedora in every church he enters,
this is our clergy at its most hip, right-on, and happening — and, for me, as
dated as those terms. He is priest-lite in much the same way that our Tony is
PM-lite — and the story he tells is milked for every element that is matey,
irreverent, easily digestible.
The illustrations are cheap and sensational: watching him being driven
around London in a stretch limo with a pair of good-time girls gives me little
new insight into the loose morals of the Restoration; mounting a stepladder to
deliver an impromptu sermon in a shopping mall adds little to our appreciation
of John Wesley’s mission.
Some of his historical assertions seem highly questionable, or plain wrong:
"Most ordinary people never stopped believing in witches" can’t be right. No
doubt many people still followed superstitious customs that originated in pagan
beliefs, but this surely didn’t supersede their fundamental belief in Christ.
The drama of Bonfire Night anti-popery celebrations at Lewes provides
Owen-Jones with exactly the kind of sensational footage that he likes.
But this is where my harangue peters out — because he is absolutely right to
stress how widespread was the fear and hatred of Catholicism. His focus on the
importance of William III’s Toleration Act, and the ending of the persecution
of Dissenters, is a timely reminder of a crucial moment is our history. Even
his cheesiest illustrations, like playing with Scalectrix in the chancel to
demonstrate Newton’s concept of God, ended with a surprisingly moving insight.
Almost everything about this programme urged me to switch it off: I’d have
missed something rather good if I had.
The central part played by religion in our island story got further
prime-time coverage on Channel 4 last week: Monarchy by David Starkey
(Monday) and, on Thursday, Elizabeth I. Starkey — who is now so grand
that we almost expect the title to be "Monarchy, by Permission of David
Starkey" — told us the story of James I and VI’s succession and reign. As
is now the norm, the significance of competing versions of Christianity, their
theologies and practices, was treated seriously and unapologetically, giving us
far better food for reflection than many supposedly religious broadcasts.
Elizabeth I was simply superlative, a model of how good drama can
reinterpret the past, however familiar, stripping the varnish from a well-loved
portrait. Helen Mirren’s portrayal of the Virgin Queen will, I suspect, quickly
become a TV classic, as iconic as its subject.
The South Bank Show (ITV, Sunday) presented us with a contemporary
British icon in the person of Alan Bennett. Bennett revisited significant
scenes from his life — school, Leeds Town Hall, church, hospital — in a kind of
Everyman journey. It was gentle, affectionate, slow-paced, lugubrious: a
perfect end to Sunday.