THE three-month public consultation on the next BBC Charter closed this week. We now await the draft of the new Charter, to be debated in Parliament before the current one expires at the end of 2027. The Archbishop of York spoke for many people of faith last week when he voiced fears about the place of religious programming at the BBC. Religious broadcasting, he argued, was a “precious bulwark” against intolerance and extremism in contemporary society, but it was increasingly being marginalised — and this amounted to neglect by the Corporation of its “core business”. The figures speak for themselves. There has been a remarkable fall in religious broadcasting in recent years: the veteran BBC broadcaster Roger Bolton reports that the amount of original UK-produced content on religion and ethics at peak time on all public-service-broadcasting platforms fell by an astonishing 85 per cent between 2011 and 2022.

There have long been rumblings that it is difficult to get serious religious programmes commissioned at the BBC. Magzine-style pitches, usually involving celebrities, are more likely to get the green light than anything weightier or more educational. Yet the commissioners should not fear that viewers and listeners will be alienated by anything too challenging or religious. Call The Midwife portrays faith unflinchingly and is a massive hit.

The BBC may likewise be missing a trick in the case of the elusive Millennial and younger generations here. Only last month, Tony Pastor, who co-founded the hugely successful Goalhanger podcast stable with Gary Lineker, gave a speech in which he said that young people were connecting with podcasts that no commissioner at a UK TV station would ever dream of making. “People keep telling us that the TikTok generation only want short-form,” he said. “We are finding the exact opposite. The average age of a listener for our shows is 33.” He gave as an example a recent five-part series on the history of Carthage: millions of people in their twenties and thirties had tuned in to watch and listen to “five or six hours of long-form content”.

Mr Pastor may have been referring to history rather than religion: the success of Goalhanger’s The Rest of History is the stuff of envy in the media world; it had 26 million downloads this January alone. But when its hosts investigate religious subjects — as they often do — there is no evidence of a sudden drop-off in interest. This younger generation displays an appetite for just the sort of substantial long-form content that BBC commissioners appear unwilling to risk including in their schedules. Even aside from the fact that a substantial majority of the global population subscribe to one of the great faiths, an understanding of the religious landscape is essential for social cohesion. The BBC commissioners could get a surprise. The ecosystem may be different, but an audience for religion remains.