I am writing this on Maundy Thursday. Tomorrow is the most solemn day of the Christian Year, a day which commemorates appalling suffering and sacrifice, and this is a Christian country, built on Christian heritage, shaped by the Church. Yet it would appear that this is just another bank holiday. Shops are open, special attractions are on offer, the roads are jammed as people head for the coast, the lakes, Scotland and major airports.
I opened my Radio Times. Perhaps the BBC would be showing The Greatest Story Ever Told? Perhaps Talking Pictures TV would be offering Jesus of Nazareth? Maybe some other channel would give us The Passion of the Christ?
Nothing doing. To be sure the pages have a great banner across the top saying “Good Friday” but it is illustrated with cartoon birds and a helicopter. It is all very jolly with no hint of anything sombre.
Channel 5 is the only one which seems fully to acknowledge the day. Ben-Hur, with its climax of a miracle caused by the Crucifixion stretches across the solemn hour and later there is a two-hour documentary on the last days of Christ. Doubtless it will rubbish the Gospels, but at least it is a recognition of the historical importance of Good Friday.
By contrast the other main channels offer very little. At 9am BBC One has Fern Britton off around the Holy Land and thereafter nothing at all. No religious service, no relevant documentaries, no relevant films. BBC Two offers Mary Berry’s Easter Feast. No, it is absolutely not a feast day. It does, however, give us King of Kings across the solemn hour. ITV doesn’t give even the most cursory nod to the day. I trawled from 6am until midnight and found zilch. As far as its bosses are concerned it is just another Friday. The same is true of Channel 4.
The Freeview channels are just as bad. At 3pm they offer variously Carry on Screaming, St Trinian’s or Call the Midwife…Is it any wonder that so many children and even adults no longer know the meaning of Good Friday when it is so comprehensively ignored and even jollified?
There are many elderly, sick or housebound Christians who are unable to attend church over Easter and who will therefore rely on the media to help them share in Good Friday. These are the same people who rely on Songs of Praise, which has recently changed beyond all recognition. They are increasingly dispossessed. Their parents and grandparents were luckier, living in an age in which the media had yet to be embarrassed by religion and were still happy to bring it into peoples’ homes.
One of the great benefits of the old approach was the pause. On Sundays, whether you observed the Sabbath or not, there was a pause in everyday worldly pursuits. Shops and offices were shut. The racecourses were silent. A bank holiday was just that, with all the banks closed alongside shops both great and small.
Now the world simply roars on non-stop, with Christmas Day about the only time there is true silence in the high streets. That is probably why the modern craze for meditation (not of course on Christ or the eternal mysteries but on breathing) has begun to take off. It offers a pause. Time out. Peace and quiet. A withdrawal from the howl of commerce and competition, from striving, from the ceaseless quest for more, more, more.
The same can probably be asserted for the baffling craze of grown-up colouring books. It is an escape from daily pressure. The media used to help with pauses from Thought for the Day all the way through till the Epilogue in an age when test cards, not advertisements, filled the blanks. Now we demand haste and it is a rare mortal who has patience with a slow internet connection.
Good Friday is for Christians a profound pause in which we reflect on another life and its purpose. Of course it is not necessary for everybody else to pause too to enable that to happen but it undeniably helps if there is a general slowing down around us, if there is a widespread acknowledgement of the day as something different from the other 364.
For many years we have grown used to managing without that but what is changing is that the day is now being treated festively. I have already pointed to the jolly banner across the Radio Times but now we have Easter egg hunts, presents and the Easter Bunny everywhere three days early.
Many churches hold processions on Good Friday. It is supposed to be an act of witness but I strongly suspect that these days spectators simply think it is all part of the entertainment.
Ann Widdecombe is a novelist, broadcaster and former prisons minister
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