LOYAL TV-watching Anglicans who are eager to inform their prayers and thanksgivings with current events have two daily options on BBC1: either structure morning prayer around the BBC Breakfast show, or recite compline after the BBC News at Ten. Occasionally, I force myself (on your behalf, of course) to watch both, particularly when momentous news stories are developing. Last week’s attempted assassination of Donald Trump (News, 19 July) and Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race certainly fell into that category.
“The sun that bids us rest is waking Our brethren ’neath the western sky.” The technological marvel of rolling global news should inspire us with a sense of wonder at a continual unfolding, and our perception of events a constant enlarging and deepening perspective. Unfortunately, the relevant text at breakfast time belongs not to the hymnal but to scripture, to God turning back the passage of the sun in 2 Kings 20, the biblical version of Groundhog Day, where time repeats itself over and over.
Benefiting those just switching on, the same stories, the same film clips, the same interviews are constantly reshown, inspiring not wonder, but fatigue: not igniting connectedness with the world around us, but engendering growing irritation. Ecclesiastes 1.9, “Nothing new under the sun”, might be the programme’s appropriate motto, by no means redeemed by the extended items presented as news, but, in truth, adverts for forthcoming BBC programmes.
My solar imagery is inspired by Channel 5’s two-part Secrets of the Sun with Dara O Briain (16 and 23 July). The genial comedian presents an attractive guide to our 4.5-billion-year-old star: “the creator of all that we see”. The Creed certainly questions that assertion, but lay that to one side as science reveals greater and greater understanding of how the sun works, and how it affects us.
It is a remarkable paradox that without the sun’s activity there would be no life on earth — and yet without our atmosphere’s and magnetic field’s protecting shield, we would be shrivelled up into nothingness. It is all about balance. Our greater understanding is pretty much a growing realisation of how extremely precarious that balance is, and how fatally our own activities are pushing it off kilter.
The four-part crime drama The Jetty (BBC1, from 15 July) derives tension from many scenes’ crepuscular darkness: we watch harder when we cannot make out what is going on, or, indeed, whom we are watching. Otherwise, it is rather good. Squandered impact of opening scenes and subsequent inconsequential over-complexity are common in this genre, but here, after a wobbly start, the plot becomes increasingly compelling. The widowed detective Ember Manning unearths a web of local crime; but does her all-consuming anger at endemic sexual exploitation of under-age girls derive from deeply buried personal experience — possibly even involving the love of her life?