I applauded loudly at Billy Graham’s last “crusade”, in New York in 2005. I swayed to the music at a soul and gospel church service in Antigua a few years ago. But I spent half of Bishop Michael Curry’s 14-minute sermon at the Royal Wedding staring through splayed fingers.
My overwhelming reaction was one of embarrassment. I don’t want to be out of tune with the mood of the nation. I adore Prince Harry. I’m a fan of Meghan’s. But the bishop hit the wrong note. He failed to judge his audience.
Yes, I loved his biblical references – “There is a balm in Gilead” and all the rest of it. And, yes, I was hypnotised by the call and response at Billy Graham’s rally and the gospel singing in Antigua.
But call and response only work if there’s a response. The bishop called – and the Royal Family, and the congregation, didn’t respond; apart from the bride’s mother, Doria Ragland, who did some subdued nodding at the bishop’s enthused cries.
I’m with the Royal Family on this one. I’m afraid a lifetime of attending British church services – particularly Anglican ones – has conditioned me to a solemn, low-key response to entering a church; particularly St George’s Chapel, a Royal Peculiar under the direct jurisdiction of the Queen, where Henry VIII is buried under the Quire. You could hardly find a more Anglican – and English – place in the world.
At a time when we’re encouraged to let it all hang out, to scream the deepest intimacies of our personal life across the quiet carriage on the 10.37 to Bristol, I love the low-key atmosphere of church.
That’s why I instinctively react with horror to the sign of peace; or to guitar-strumming vicars, with fixed grins and Technicolor vestments. Their faux enthusiasm is literally out of tune with the damped-down atmosphere of an ancient church.
Britain used to be the global repository for awkwardness. Hushed churches – and low-key sermons and mumbled hymns – were once a last refuge from the agony of embarrassment.
The bishop’s showmanship would have worked fine with an unembarrassable congregation. Our Royal Family, thank God, are still clinging on to our atavistic capacity for awkwardness.
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St George’s Chapel is a triumph of Perpendicular Gothic, with its fan-vaulted ceiling and the mullions of its windows soaring, straight as a die, towards heaven. Of all the Gothic periods – Early English, Decorated and Perpendicular – Perpendicular is the one true British style, the only one we didn’t borrow from the Continent.
Some patriotic architectural historians declare that those huge banks of glass – “Hardwick Hall, more glass than wall,” as they say of the Elizabethan prodigy house in Derbyshire – just wouldn’t work in southern Europe. Try going to Mass in a Perpendicular church by the Mediterranean in high summer, and you’d roast to death.
I’m not sure that patriotic, geographical determinism is right. The heating bill in St George’s Chapel – with all those windows, and our cold, northern climate – must be horrendous.
Perpendicular Gothic does mean, though, that all those windows provide tremendous volumes of illumination for a beautiful American bride on a high spring day in England.
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Hugh Grant was absolutely magnificent as Jeremy Thorpe in the BBC’s A Very English Scandal. From the moment he had his breakout hit, Four Weddings and a Funeral, in 1994, I’ve been saying what a gifted actor he is. Cynical friends said he was just playing himself – a posh bumbler.
In fact, he is neither a bumbler, nor is he posh. And yet he is a genius at playing the 50 shades of posh: from keen young shaver in The Remains of the Day; to the ineffectual Sloane in Four Weddings; to the pantomime villain thesp in Paddington 2; to amusing, sly, camp Jeremy Thorpe.
In each role, the posh voice is ever so slightly different – as upper-class voices have changed from the crisp, clipped vowels of Thorpe to the lazier, more demotic tones of the early 1990s Sloane in Four Weddings.
It helps, too, that Russell T Davies, the programme’s writer, completely understands the way posh people speak. There’s the love of nicknames: Thorpe refers to his ally and fellow Liberal MP, Peter Bessell, as Pedro. And there’s the posh love of being frivolous about serious things, and vice versa. The scene where Bessell and Thorpe interrupt their discussion of his career-threatening scandal to talk about the quality of their lemon posset is spot on.
For someone so good looking as Grant, he is also marvellously lacking in vanity. Never have I seen someone with such a full head of hair so glory in a comb-over, with his parting moored perilously low on the side of the head – the classic giveaway.
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