The Rev Will Be Televised
The BBC’s latest offering to the sitcom gods is Rev, the usual half hour, oh-they’re-in-a-pickle-now kinda thing, with the twist being that it’s not just about a vicar, but about an inner city vicar. It’s been hammered home by the BBC that this is a chance to move away from everyone’s favourite fat theological. Gone is the twee image of the countryside – instead, the writers are forcing themselves to deal with the issues.
The move away from Dibley and the countryside and into the city is taken to the ends of the East London – one of the most deprived areas in the country, lest we forget – and the first episode delved straight into the pressing matters of our time: vandalism, faith schools and small church congregations. (Okay, some of these are more pressing than others).
To sum up: the vicar, Adam, has just moved into his new parish, St Saviours on the Marshes. In the first week, the stained glass window is broken, and vandalism is suspected. In order to raise money to pay for the damages, the vicar is encouraged (by his church superior and his inner self) to accept money from the local MP in exchange for his kid to go to the church school, even though the kid’s family don’t really go to church. Eventually the vicar has a chat with god (overdubbed – no response from God booming through my speakers, I’m glad to say), has a bout of conscience, refuses the money, and settles for the broken window instead. The vandalism also turns out to be by one of the church regulars, an amicable drunk, and entirely by accident.
In the midst of this we have some casual racism (the only black character is a ‘cassock-chaser’ who orgasms during sermons, a clear dig at Pentecostalism), and the only asian character is a pervy chiropractor who inappropriately feels up the vicar’s wife.
Importantly, the countryside is also held up as a paradise in its absence – the vicar (originally from a small parish church in Suffolk) has a terrible time cycling in the godforsaken city, and is surrounded by ‘church whores’ who only pray in order to get their kids into the local church school. When the amicable drunk is having a crisis of faith, ranting about Richard Dawkins, the vicar takes the example of a snail shell as proof of God’s existence, something in nature (in the unchanging, green and pleasant sense) being beautiful, even though it doesn’t have to be.
But, despite the continuing distinction between countryside and city in that unhelpful, English way (and the casual racism), I think there’s definitely some redemption in the show. It displays religion as a working, functioning thing, albeit something which doesn’t necessarily do good things even when it’s functioning well.
If you’re an atheist like me (and I suspect that most readers of this blog are), then the scene of the vicar relishing the thought of setting prospective parents a Bible quiz in order to allow their kids into the Church school is scary and a bit sickening – but I think it’s also accurate, showing the close ties between money, property, class and religion which dominate the contemporary church. And it’s brave of the writers to broadcast this. (Interestingly, the mere presence of Olivia Colman from The Office and Peep Show, means that it all feels very ironic and sinister).
Religion is still big, and I think it would be a mistake to dismiss all progressive politics within it simply because the expression invokes God rather than ‘the people’ or some other transcendent being. Of course I’d rather that we got rid of transcendence altogether, but in the meanwhile I’m not going to pretend as if I/we have. Anarchists like David Graeber definitely rely on the imagination in the same way that Renaissance theologians use the soul, but this doesn’t mean there isn’t a hell of a lot of good politics and ideas going on in his writing. And the same goes for other radical transcendentalists like Christian anarchists and progressive Muslims.
I think our mistake too much of the time is to pretend as if the political ideology which causes the back-room deals of the MP trying to get his kid into a faith school is structurally different from the theological ideology which makes the vicar talk to God and expect a response.
Once you accept that we’re all living a lie of one kind or another, the point stops being about how good the lie is, but how progressive the results are. Mind you, I didn’t even get onto writing about the generalised sexism in the show…
Reader Comments
Just watched the first episode of this. Apart from all the above, it wasn’t very funny.
He was good in Cambridge Spies though wasn’t he?
Agreed on the ‘not very funny’ part. Not so sure about the casual racism, though. It’s important not to see racism where it doesn’t exist, and really, here, I find it hard to see any.
Consider first of all that this is a sitcom about a CofE congregation. In case you’re not aware, the congregations of Church of England churches are overwhelmingly made up of people whose families are not newcomers to this country. Personally, I couldn’t care less what colour someone’s skin is, but I’m happy enough with the idea that the group that you wish to define by their skin colour is predominantly made up of relatively recent incomers and as such likely to be under-represented in the Church of England.
Moreover, there are precisely two members of the congregation who are major characters. One is the ‘token’, both are mad. If you want to talk about casual racism, why do you only object to the portrayal of a darker skinned person as unsane? Frankly, though, it’s a sitcom, so it’s only if a character’s not mad that you have cause to worry. Personally I find it quite racist to suggest that someone can’t play a pervy chiropractor on TV because their skin is the wrong colour to make you happy, but there you go.
In fact, I think you’ve got hold of completely the wrong end of the stick throughout. Your Dawkins example completely missed the point, which was mildly poking fun at CofE beliefs – the joke about the snail-shell was that that’s how CofE people see god in their lives, as opposed to big miracles and literal voices. There is also a poignancy there, in the way this rather humble, well-meaning, and essentially powerless vicar is attempting to help people with real problems in their lives.
Looks like you also got confused about who was being made fun of in the ‘religion quiz’ bit – it was about the hypocritical non-religious parents ‘whose entire self-worth depends’* on their kids getting into faith schools, and the panic that’d ensue if they were actually faced with such a test. In fact we have laws against that kind of selection, but it was just a joke anyway.
[*For what it's worth, I thought that was one of the few really funny lines.]
Basically, I watched it, and didn’t find it too funny, but I could find nothing to dislike about the main character. There’s a sort of Marion and Jeff pathos to him, as well as the kind of inoffensive gentleness that *is* CofE to the core.
@Dave: Yes, the snail shell was meant to show the realities of what CofE vicars do, exactly. My point is that one of the good things about this show is that it does have an accurate representation of the CofE, including what to me are its ideological flaws, such as the fetishization of ‘nature’.
- As for the casual racism, my point isn’t that the only pervy chiropractor is asian, but that the only asian characters is a pervy chiropractor. Similarly for Doah, it’s not that the only ‘unsane’ person is black (as you rightly point out, that would be untrue) but that the only black character is ‘unsane’.
- I think the meaning of that inoffensive gentleness depends partly on how much you agree with faith schools. Evil can be banal, no?
I saw this. There was nothing in the programme you could even faintly call racist.
If anything, protecting ethnic minorities with editorial bubble-wrap – “shall we make this ethnic minority representative have an illicit affair? Ooh we’d better not, it might look racist,” – is far more racist than anything this anything brought forth from this BBC episode.
Fair play, you only talk about it for a short paragraph, but I can just imagine the writers of this program cringing reading something as over-interpretive as this.
Richard>
You need to worry more about crying ‘wolf’. Finding racism where none exists is a negative thing, if only because it turns some people off listening to real issues of racism.
If you’d like to suggest which of the characters would and would not be acceptable to you if played by an actor with darker skin, it would be enlightening. To my mind, the only casual, unintended racism here is your insistence that having brown skin precludes an actor from playing characters with any negative personality attributes. I really can’t see that ‘an Asian’ is any more or less likely to be a creepy chiropractor than anyone else. I can see there might be some issues with, say, a miserly Jewish moneylender, but this is not the same thing at all.
The only legitimate justification for your view that I can think of would be if there was some difference between the comically-extreme natures of the characters, but in fact the only normal one in the show is the long-suffering vicar’s-wife – put there for contrast.
Other than that, I think I might have misunderstood the rest of what you were saying originally, having got off on the wrong foot – I assumed it was almost all criticism, rather than a mixture of criticism and comment.
Generally, I think you came down a bit hard on the faith school thing – I assumed it was mainly there for the running gags. In principle, I entirely agree with you that religion isn’t great, and nor are faith schools. One of the things that is to be praised about the CofE, though, is that they are confident enough about their own beliefs that they are willing to let people poke mild fun at them. Another is that, if you have to have organized religion – I don’t, personally – then the CofE is about as unobjectionable way to organize it as you can find. I find it very hard to think of them as evil.
The snail shell is probably the most interesting thing here to talk about, but I’ve written enough already. (Is that a mixed not-metaphor?) I’m interested why you see ‘fetishization of nature’ as a flaw, really. Is it just a matter of degree, or a diametric opposition?
Actually, you know, I make an explicit distinction between immanent and transcendent imagination.
DG
@DG: True, you do. I’m not sure, however, that the idea of the immanent imagination as traced by yourself, Agamben and Mary Carruthers, that is, a productive imagination, really gets away from the kind of criticism a Marxist would make about transcendentalism. Mainly, I suppose, because it relies on the idea that we have more control over our imaginative processes (including the producing element of them) than other ‘material’ (i.e. violent) processes. While I think that maybe this is a notion very pertinent for our time (Negrist arguments and all), I think there’s a danger that in order to stress the importance of imagination, we also reify it.
@Dave:The distinction between the natural and the artificial denigrates the importance of material reality: that a building and a lawn are equally human-made, that a woodland and a rotting council block are equally abandoned to nature. In other words, that our concept of what is natural and what is not is entirely ideological, and perpetuates the ability for people to make arguments according to an appeal to nature. E.g. the big tree blocking out your light is natural; violence is natural. Or vice versa: computers are bad because they’re unnatural. Of course this all sounds like gibberish, but it’s the exact kind of discourse which is propped up by appeals to an unchanging, perfect ‘nature’.
Hmm, well, depends what sort of Marxist. Marx made it perfectly clear that he felt that what made humans human was that they produce, and production meant imagination (bees and architects and all that), a passage that was interestingly excised from the Soviet versions of Capital. Myself, I consider the distinction between material and immaterial (as embraced in Lazzarato and Negri’s use of terms like “immaterial labor”, meaning labor meant to produce immaterial objects) as interesting only as an ideological construct – it has no meaning whatsoever in a practical, dialectical view of reality. There are no immaterial forms of human labor, or action. There are no forms of action that do not involve some conceptions meaning, violence included (my point about violence was not that it was in any way more material, only that it could have _some_ relatively predictable effects on people you don’t understand) – in fact, arguably by definition, since like production, “action” (as opposed to mere instinctual behavior) has to be based on some conception of what’s going on.
Richard>
I think there’s a tendency to see a clear distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’, but, like most things, it’s a spectrum. The alternative is, as you so rightly point out, an almost pantheistic concept of nature, where everything is natural – gibberish was more succinct.
The snail in question originally is an interesting case in point. The mathematical perfection of the shell is entirely natural, in the sense that it has been unaffected in its formation by any human input. On the other hand, though, the very fact that the snail is there at all is the result of the compounding of many environmental factors, some large proportion of which are directly or indirectly affected by humans – and hence, the snail is also unnatural.
Of course, for a theist, there’s no reason to stop there – you can go on looking at whether something is divinely influenced, and so-on. To some people, it’s turtles all the way down.
I’m quite enjoying this show, but I was sufficiently uncomfortable after watching this week’s episode with yet another unpleasant black person in it to google for ‘bbc’ ‘rev’ and ‘racist’, landing up here.
There simply are no black characters who aren’t odious: the crack addict, the cassock chaser, the letcherous fiancé.
Perhaps I am out of touch and this is a genuine reflection of London society. I am more inclined to suspect that, as Richard says, what we have here is casual racism.
In deference to Dave’s warning (above), I agree that this sort of racism is much less immediately harmful than, say, the activities of the EDL. However, it is more insidious. It is really not fair to say that only the starkest of race issues are worthy of debate.
As an aside, I wonder which is worse:
• employ black actors to play outrageously racist stereotypes
• employ no ethnic actors at all*
*e.g. C4′s Green Wing: a British hospital with no Asian doctors? Come on!