“THE Bible as Literature” was the subject of All Things Considered (BBC Radio Wales, Sunday). At least, that’s how it was billed. It was recorded at the Hay Festival, after all. So, as a nod to books, Jonathan Thomas reminded his live audience that, according to the SPCK, sales of the world’s bestseller have gone up by 87 per cent in the past five years.
Duty done, he and his guests dived into a discussion about the so-called “Quiet Revival” (News, 11 April), questioning whether the growing interest in religion and the Bible among young men, in particular, reflects a search for spiritual meaning or a drift towards right-wing politics and more traditional gender roles.
About halfway through the programme, there was a sharp handbrake turn, as if it suddenly occurred to the presenter or his producer that the audience might have been hoping to learn about the Bible’s different literary genres and how they came about. Dr Belle Tindall, from the Centre for Cultural Witness at Lambeth Palace, spoke about how literature might have been experienced in the first century.
It would have been aural, interactive, communal. Barely one per cent of people would have been “visually literate”, meaning that the author of St Mark’s Gospel, for example, had to rely on mnemonic devices in the telling of his stories.
Interlude over, and Jonathan Thomas resumed lobbing huge questions at Dr Tindall and his other guests: the Priest-in-Charge of Brecon and Epynt, Canon Mark Clavier, and Charlotte Thomas, an honorary tutor at Cardiff University. Should we engage with the Bible’s violent, nasty bits? Is the Bible used to justify patriarchy?
The programme may not have been quite what the audience expected, or even what the producers planned, but its engaging and lively style and rich content surely met the high standards demanded by festivalgoers at Hay. It certainly worked for me.
I hesitated before committing myself to all two-and-a-half hours of The Smuggler (Radio 4, 26 May-6 June). But, after the first two episodes, I was hooked, and gobbled up the remaining eight on BBC Sounds in one sitting. The combination of storytelling, music, and effects created the feel of a fictional thriller, with a cliffhanger at the end of every instalment. But the series was actually a feat of dogged investigative reporting, shedding light on one of the biggest challenges facing the country.
Annabel Deas’s main guest was Nick, a British former soldier turned people-smuggler turned informant turned people-smuggler again. He agreed to tell his story, he said, because he wanted to expose the sometimes farcical failures in Border Control.
First, he helped to conceal migrants on lorries on cross-Channel ferries. Then he became one of the first smugglers to hit on the idea of bringing people across the Channel in small boats — in this instance, his own, which he bought for the purpose, and moored in an exclusive marina on the south coast. He worked with a gang trafficking Vietnamese people into the UK to work on cannabis farms.
Nick didn’t want to think that some of these people were victims of modern slavery, or about the fact that he didn’t dignify them with so much as a life jacket. I can’t be alone in finding the eight-year prison sentence that he was given for his part in this international racket ludicrously lenient.