IF YOU think that Dame Prue Leith can be harsh in her assessment of a soggy sponge, then you should hear her views on the Alpha course. “A lot of rubbish . . . like a big dating agency . . . singing the most boring songs.” She had been encouraged to attend by her son, the MP Danny Kruger, for whom God “has done a lot of good”. But religion is evidently not for her. “The idea of a God needing to be worshipped . . . [is] despicable.”
Her interviewer, Elizabeth Oldfield, was too polite to push back at Dame Prue’s caricature of the Divine; and, though a product of the respected think tank Theos, on the evidence of this episode, the podcast The Sacred (released Wednesdays: theosthinktank.co.uk) is to religious discourse as fairy cake is to sourdough. In the company of a guest as engaging as Dame Prue, that hardly matters; but one would have liked to hear more, for instance, about that phase of intense faith which she felt at the age of 11, and what caused it to pass.
She recounted a story about her going into a church after the death of her husband, and railing against God. It would have been interesting to understand more of her motivations here; but, instead, the anecdote turned into one about the embarrassment of being discovered by the church’s flower-arranger. Perhaps the Alpha course has deterred her from ever again exploring the inner workings of the soul.
The Shadow Pope (Radio 4, Monday of last week, repeat) escaped my attention when it was first broadcast earlier in the month. Ed Stourton’s exposition of Vatican politics is certainly worthy of its second airing, and provides some insight into the rival courts now operating around Pope Francis and Pope Emeritus Benedict.
The starting point was the story of the Pachamama statue thrown into the Tiber as a protest against elements of Pope Francis’s plans for evangelisation in the Amazon. Liberal in some respects, authoritarian in others (notably in restrictions on the Tridentine mass), Francis has managed to disappoint opposing elements of the faithful. Meanwhile, Benedict has become the focal point for traditionalist dissent.
The grim denouement will be reached, according to Stourton and his expert commentators, when one or both die; and the future of the Vatican’s progressive agenda will largely depend on who goes first.
One of the most valuable strands on BBC Radio is surely Between the Ears (Radio 3, weekdays last week), providing a platform for the experimental, the brilliant, and the daft. In a week of “shorts”, five sound-artists offered stories and collages prompted by cards from a tarot pack.
You have to wade through the pretension to get to the good stuff (“a box has an inside and an outside . . . a box is a construct” — an insight courtesy of Thursday’s episode), but good stuff there certainly was. The Croatian story “The House in a House” (Tuesday) was particularly strong: fact and fable mysteriously entwined.