The Church on British Television

From the Coronation to Coronation Street

Marcus Harmes, Meredith Harmes, Barbara Harmes

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030381127
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030381134
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Film e video

This book will be the first systematic and comprehensive text to analyze the many and contrasting appearances of the Church of England on television. It covers a range of genres and programs including crime drama, science fiction, comedy, including the specific genre of 'ecclesiastical comedy', zombie horror and non-fiction broadcasting. Readers interested in church and political history, popular culture, television and broadcasting history, and the social history of modern Britain will find this to be a lively and timely book. Programs that year after year sit enshrined as national favourites (for example Dad's Army and Midsomer Murders) foreground the Church. From the Queen's Christmas Message to royal weddings and Coronation Street, the clergy and services of England's national church abound in television. This book offers detailed analysis of landmark examples of small screen output and raises questions relating to the storytelling strategies of program makers, the way the established Church is delineated, and the transformation over decades of congregations into audiences.

© The Author(s) 2020

M. Harmes et al.The Church on British Televisionhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38113-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Marcus Harmes¹ , Meredith Harmes¹ and Barbara Harmes¹

(1)

Open Access College, University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba, QLD, Australia

Marcus Harmes (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

Meredith Harmes

Email: [email protected]

Barbara Harmes

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Coronation Street began in December 1960 with an argument about the Church of England. Ena Sharples barged into the corner shop and into the world of the soap opera and immediately began to quarrel with the new shopkeeper about churchgoing. Early years of Coronation Street were steeped in religion. Sharples was caretaker and harmonium player of the Glad Tidings Mission, where Leonard Swindley was lay preacher. Their nonconformity evoked a particular Northern religiosity with long antecedents, including the Lantern Yard community in George Eliot’s Silas Marner (1861), and was a religious identity at odds with the Church of England’s establishment status. In Coronation Street episode one, Sharples demanded to know where the new shopkeeper went to church. The shopkeeper’s vague response that she is not especially religious made Sharples jump to the conclusion she must be ‘C of E’. Further disparagement of the national Church then followed, Ena deriding her sister-in-law for social climbing by becoming Anglican: ‘Oh it’s like my sister’s husband’, who said ‘“we’re civic dignitaries now. We must head for church”. Within a week they were received, christened, and confirmed and within a fortnight she was sitting up all night sewing surplices’. Ena’s assumption was that the Church of England stood for class, status, snobbery and lukewarm belief. Seven years earlier, at Elizabeth II’s Coronation, television viewers watched the highest echelons in the Empire gathered around the archbishop of Canterbury, presenting a vision of the Church and elites also evoked by Ena Sharples’ tirade. Coronation Street and the Coronation are indicative of the many ways, that the Church of England has been a significant presence in British television. The Church as subject matter and setting traverses changes in a number of disparate areas: in policy and legislation, in taste and aesthetics, and in production methods and scheduling priorities.

Off screen and in reality the Church in the twenty-first century may have a dwindling influence and shrinking number of worshippers, but it remains a compelling source for drama and human interest. The institution, including its liturgy, discipline, organisations and doctrines, has inspired decades of comedy and drama. Its people, from humble vicars to bishops, as well as the spouses and children of the parsonage, and the laity, are part of this television content.

This study examines both fictional and non-fictional television involving the Church of England. In Part I: Shaping the Medium, we consider the Church’s own efforts to shape television through means such as script approval, efforts to produce a professional looking and sounding body of clergy to appear on television, and lobbying broadcasters and ministers through its Radio and Television Council. Key moments in the history of British television, from the launch of the television service itself, the development of second, third and fourth terrestrial channels and commercial advertising will be seen anew from the perspective of influential voices from within the Church. But we will also see that influence decline.

In Part II: Shaped by the Medium, we look at the opposite, the Church not as shaping but as a creation of the media, and consider the discursive constructions of the Church on the screen and how the television industry itself, including people with no connection to the Church, have shaped perceptions of it through their programmes. In Part II, each chapter examines television programmes showing the Church’s interactions with specific organisations, institutions and occasions: with the marches of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, with the high politics of Downing Street, with inner-city communities decaying under Thatcherism, and with the law. In each case, specific programmes raise questions about how these interactions inform the place of the Church in modern society.

These programmes and broadcasts traverse genres and approaches. There is no ‘canon’ as such of Church of England programmes. Television programmes about the Church or programmes that highlight it in some way have appeared across all genres, types, schedules and channels. There are sitcoms, science fiction serials, soap operas and broadcasts of actual events such as weddings and funerals. Broadcasters have longstanding commitments to the broadcasting of Church’s own key moments such as the enthronement of archbishops. Sometimes the broadcasting is lavish and large scale and sometimes intimate, such as the short serious talks delivered by vicars in the epilogue.

This analysis centres on core organising questions. First, as the real-life Church grows ever more remote from the daily lives of many people, what are the implications for its place in public consciousness of being on the small screen, the most intimate and immediate form of broadcasting? Second, as television shows different aspects of the Church while fewer people engage with the real-life institution, what impressions are created, what distortions are propagated, and what is the influence of iterations of popular culture on shaping relationships between people and the national Church? Third, in what way are these televisual texts part of a wider social discourse around religion? In short, what are the stories that television tells about the Church, and what televisual entities have emerged to take the place of real-life engagement with organised religion?

This study encompasses some of the most enduring television programmes that appear on British television. Studying the Church and television together is rare in scholarly writing. There are isolated instances of academic study of some of the programmes under scrutiny, including The Vicar of Dibley , Yes, Prime Minister and major examples of non-fiction broadcasting including the 1953 Coronation and Panorama . However, there have been limited attempts to explore the longer history of the Church of England as both a participant in and the subject of broadcasting. The large-scale Oxford History of Anglicanism gave limited attention to broadcasting or mass media. There are studies of organised religion and broadcasting in other national contexts: one important parallel approach is Richard Wolff’s The Church on TV, a study of multiple Christian denominations on American television (2010). His text explored both intersections and distinctions relating to fictional representations and actual churches, but aside from the American focus, its range of denominations and traditions was eclectic. In recent years, scholarly monographs have examined important aspects of television history. The ubiquitous adaptations of Agatha Christie’s crime fiction on British television are the subject of Mark Aldridge’s 2016 monograph Agatha Christie on Screen. A broader study of British television by Lez Cooke appeared in 2003 and Gavin Schaffer’s The Vision of the Nation (2014) examined race and multiculturalism on British television.

While religion and broadcasting have separately received scholarly and journalistic attention, on television, the Church of England vicar is ubiquitous. He or she is taking drugs on Coronation Street , solving crime in Rev , getting murdered in Midsomer Murders or critiquing television itself on Gogglebox. An institution that is integral to popular culture warrants a study of its principal means of interaction with popular culture, particularly how the small screen has been shaped by and in turn mediates the Church for mass consumption.

It is important to clarify major aspects of the approach taken here: why the Church of England and why television? By law, the Church of England is the established church. Its clergy, especially its bishops, speak publicly as befits their status as the leaders of the national Church. Television seems the most effective medium for them to reach wider audiences. In early chapters of this study, we will especially see Geoffrey Fisher, archbishop of Canterbury from 1945 to 1961, as a shaper of the medium in ways hitherto unconsidered by television and church historians and even his own biographers. Establishment makes the Church of England more than just another denomination, giving it unique privileges and a unique place in public life, but also posing distinctive challenges. Until the later twentieth century, it was also the largest religious denomination in the British Isles and it remains the Church that marries royals and maintains the cathedrals that are major tourist drawcards.

It is however English, whereas broadcasting covers the entire British Isles. Even when considering regional independent franchises such as Harlech (HTV) or Yorkshire Television, as well as the BBC’s own history of regional broadcasting from Pebble Mill or BBC Scotland, the Britishness of this broadcasting can be deceptive. For most of the period covered by this book, the BBC’s base of operations for its television production was the Television Centre in White City and before that Lime Grove, Riverside and Alexandra Palace, supported by the rehearsal facilities in Acton. Until 1994, the Department of Religion and Ethics remained centrally located (Noonan 2012, 367). Independent companies were more widely distributed but frequently still London-centric, including the studios in Teddington and the use of production facilities at Elstree and Shepperton in the Home Counties. Much of the drama output of the period covered by this book is accordingly not just English in accent and emphasis, but southern English. That bias, as well as the consolidation of technical and creative personnel in the capital, had implications for religious broadcasting. Churches and cathedrals in London were convenient and obvious centres to broadcast hymns and sermons.

Methodologically, the English Church and its refractions and recreations on television alone provide an important focus. One focus is the Anglicanism. Further volumes could fill with other expressions of British religion, including the Scottish Presbyterian Church, the Irish Catholic Church, and the Welsh Independent and Methodist congregations, not to mention non-Christian communities.

That is not to say that this wider vista is irrelevant: the Church of England on screen should be contrasted with the dramatic treatment of other expressions of religious life. Another is the medium of television. Expansion to the many appearances of the Church in film, radio or new social media would fill volumes. Vicars and their churches abound in cinema. Yet television raises distinctive issues and asks us to pose distinctive questions precisely because it is an intimate and domestic medium and, by being so, it has a curiously direct and challenging relationship with church-going. Indeed, the Church in many ways made television happen in post-war Britain though the televising of the Coronation, the grandest and most important church service of all. The Church created a competitor for the time and attention of the populace. One of the most notable successes of the BBC in the 1960s was the dramatisation of John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga (1967). Some historians of popular culture credit it with ushering in a major sociological change by ending Sunday evening church going. At the very least, it contributed to a change in the patterns of daily activity as more people opted to buy a telev...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Back Matter