My Saturday afternoons begin with a quiet prayer of thanks for a lockdown legacy. In pre-pandemic days, I boarded a train for Manchester at two, armed with briefing notes for the following morning’s Sunday, which is broadcast from the BBC’s Salford studios. But when Covid chaos kept us all at home, the crisis inspired innovation; Auntie BBC delivered a swish bit of kit which allowed me to address the nation live from my basement study.
At first it was terrifying; the team of studio managers and producers who provide reassurance remained over 200 miles away in Salford, while I, in my dressing grown, felt utterly alone in Stockwell. The dog, rustling through discarded scripts in search of a warm foot to snooze on, made some very audible contributions. But overall, it worked so smoothly that even now I use my kit for my pre-recorded interviews when I do my Saturday prep; those long hours watching my life being stolen by unfinished works on the West Coast Mainline are a distant memory.
The programme has, however, been much on my mind, because I’ve been writing a book to mark its first half century.
Working through the archive is like watching a revolution unfold on fast forward, and what a revolution it has been. John Reith, the BBC’s founder, committed the Corporation to “prevent any decay of Christianity in a nominally Christian country”, and right up until the 1960s most of the staff in the BBC’s religion department were clergymen (no women then, of course) in the Church of England. When Donald Coggan, the Archbishop of Canterbury, delivered a “Call to the Nation” for moral revival in 1975, no fewer than 28,000 people wrote to Lambeth Palace, and Sunday devoted almost an entire edition to his speech, giving him the kind of wide-ranging interview now reserved for a prime minister on Today. That kind of response to a CofE leader is unimaginable now; I am writing this just after one of our weekly planning meetings, and there is not a single item about the national Church on next weekend’s list.
I have also been struck by the airtime we once gave to places with a link to our colonial past. Churches in Zimbabwe (Southern Rhodesia, as it was when Sunday began), South Africa, Kenya and Uganda got a much better showing than they do today, often because they were so central to post-imperial struggles. One of the small gems we have uncovered is a 1975 interview with Desmond Tutu, newly appointed as the first black Dean of Johannesburg, and already showing the qualities which made him a superstar.
Sometimes clergy tell me they listen to the programme before writing a Sunday sermon. This is of course flattering, but I am much more gratified when atheists, agnostics or members of non-Christian faiths declare themselves regulars. The decline in mainstream Christianity in Britain has been matched by an equally significant explosion of interest in religion more generally. That is partly because our religious landscape has become richly diverse; the first non-Christian item in the Sunday archive, an interview with a Muslim community leader complaining about mixed swimming and gym lessons, was broadcast in 1974. There were around a quarter of a million Muslims in the UK then; today the figure is close to four million.
It is also because almost every big story on the global stage (whether it’s Uighurs in China, the many struggles in the Middle East or Evangelical Christians in the United States) has a religious dimension, and our listeners are hungry to hear that explored. Sometimes we, like the listeners, face a steep learning curve, but we relish the challenge.
There are, as readers of this magazine will know, particular problems in interpreting Catholicism for a general audience, and these remain as tricky as ever.
In 2008 the Catholic Church in El Salvador became concerned about the deterioration of relics associated with Oscar Romero, the Archbishop of San Salvador who was assassinated while saying Mass. They were sent to Stonyhurst for preservation, and Jan Graffius, the curator there, noticed there were salt stains around the knees of the trousers he was wearing when he was killed. Drawing on evidence that he looked up and glimpsed his assassin just before the fatal shot, she concluded they were of great importance. “In that moment he knew he was going to be die,” she told Sunday, “and had to decide [whether] to duck, to run or to stand his ground. He just sweated profusely, and the physical stains of the sweat are a very permanent reminder of his bravery.”
When I tell this story to Catholics they are moved; those with more Anglican or secular sensibilities often find it uncomfortable. Bridging gaps like that is part of Sunday’s mission in a secular age, which is why it is such fun to present.
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