Archive for category: General

Thirty years after Band Aid, the revamped single, Do They Know It’s Christmas?, became the fastest-selling single of 2014. I’m delighted that it’s doing so well, but I can’t help thinking that if the target audience were confined to British schoolchildren, a better song title would be “Do They Know What Christmas Is?”

Older readers might think this is a redundant question, but I’m afraid it’s not. In some schools in this country, little is taught about the true meaning of Christmas, possibly because secular staff are unsympathetic to religious education or because of the fear of offending those of other faiths. And broadcasters aren’t doing much to remedy this ignorance. It is difficult to find any children’s programmes that regularly deal with faith issues.

There are exceptions; one-offs. This Christmas I’m looking forward to watching On Angel Wings on BBC1, a spectacular animation based on Michael Morpurgo’s picture book, which tells the Christmas story from the point of view of a young shepherd boy. But there is little else in prospect, and the conse- quences of this lack of coverage are becoming evident.

The Bible Society published a survey earlier this year that claimed that “a quarter of children indicated that they had never read, seen or heard of Noah’s Ark”, that a similar proportion had never heard of the Nativity, that 43 per cent had never heard of the Crucifixion, and that 53 per cent had never read, seen or heard of Joseph and his coat of many colours.

Does this matter? I think it does, for both cultural and communal reasons.

The United Kingdom cannot be understood without appreciating the role Christian culture has played in its development, from the introduction of the parish system to the replacement of a monarch (James II) because he was a Roman Catholic. In the time of Henry VIII what one believed about the doctrine of “transubstantiation” was literally a matter of life and death. Our 17th-century Civil War was fought in large part over the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings. Without a knowledge of Christianity, what will our schoolchildren make of much of our finest literature and drama, filled as it is with Christian imagery? Or much of the finest European art?

It is also vital that children of other faiths learn about Christmas. How can they begin to integrate into our country if they know little of the faith still at its heart?

Of course, the reverse applies, too. How can they feel welcome in this country if we make no real effort to understand what is often the most important thing to them and their families – their faiths? How many of us have bothered to learn about the festivals of Eid and Hanukkah, for example? Where there is no knowledge there is often a dangerous ignorance. Anti-semitism has reared its ugly head in Europe again and Muslims suffer from being lumped together as extremists.

A better understanding of faith would also do politicians no harm when they come to debate whether or not to intervene in parts of the world where religion is still a matter of life and death. In short, if we are to have any chance of understanding each other at home and abroad, we need to understand our different faiths.

There is another reason we should ensure that our children are religiously literate. The best of faith teaches us that we are all unique, that we are all equal in the sight of God, and that we should treat others as we ourselves wish to be treated.

I am a Trustee of the Sandford St Martin Trust Awards, which are given to encourage more and better coverage of religious and ethical issues in broadcasting. Because of the concerns I’ve listed above, we have decided to introduce a new category in 2015, for children’s programmes. We take a broad view of what constitutes a religious programme and we are not exclusively Christian – we have given awards to programmes made about Jewish and Islamic subjects, and to programmes made by atheists.

Our roots, however, are in Christianity, like the UK as a whole, and while I will certainly buy the new Band Aid 30 single, Do They Know It’s Christmas?, I also want all our children to know what Christmas really means.

First published in the Radio Times, December 2014

When was the last time God was discussed at the Edinburgh International Television Festival?

Don’t wrack your brains too hard. It was August this year.

That may come as a surprise to some TV producers and broadcasters, but the topic of religious broadcasting – and its growing importance for any understanding of foreign affairs – has come back into the mainstream, after years when the TV world, politicians and regulators preferred not to think about it.

The Edinburgh debate, God: TV’s Holy Grail?, got one of the best audience responses at the festival. It was sharply produced and had a great panel. Radio 4 Feedback presenter Roger Bolton was pitted against Polly Toynbee of the British Humanist Association, with expert comment and strong views from the BBC’s head of religion and ethics Aaqil Ahmed; Channel 4’s deputy chief creative officer Ralph Lee; and Tony Jordan, who, in addition to EastEnders and Ashes to Ashes, has adapted Bible stories for The Nativity and upcoming series The Ark.

If you wondered how religion forced its way back onto the agenda, you can thank – or blame – the Sandford St Martin Trust, which sponsored the event.

The Trust has been giving awards for excellent religious broadcasting for more than 35 years. Winners have included Professor Simon Schama for his BBC2 series The Story of the Jews, Danny Boyle, Ian Hislop, Howard Jacobson, David Suchet, Rageh Omaar, Melvyn Bragg, Sally Magnusson, Mark Tully, Tony Robinson and the Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks.

The Trust now campaigns for a greater understanding of the importance of religious broadcasting, helped by its winners and judges.

In an article headlined ‘Broadcasters must have faith in religious TV’, Ian Hislop wrote recently in Radio Times: “There are few richer repositories of stories than the world’s faiths and the extraordinary ways that human beings have attempted to find meaning through them.”

Simon Schama, who won this year’s Sandford TV Award, says views towards religion in the UK are changing. Having growing up thinking that religion was completely marginal to British life, he has now been proved “more and more wrong”, he claims,

Ed Stourton, the presenter of Radio 4’s Sunday programme, who chaired this year’s Sandford TV panel, praised the entries for taking religion out of the ghetto and, instead, reflecting the way that it touches history, current affairs and ordinary lives.

But he said the British media suffered from a “blind spot” about the importance of religion around the world and this damaged its news coverage. “Religious illiteracy” could, he said, lead to serious journalistic mistakes and warned programme-makers: “Never ignore the power of religion – you don’t have to like religion, but do take it seriously.”

Entries have now opened for the 2015 Sandford Awards – and, for the first time, there will be an award for children’s programmes which improve understanding of religion or moral or ethical issues. There should be no shortage of entries.

First published in Broadcastnow.co.uk 14 November 2014

There is a scene in Sacred Rivers, an upcoming three-part series for BBC2, in which the presenter, Simon Reeve, climbs out of his car to escape an urban Chinese traffic jam and heads on foot towards a building that he compares to a sports stadium.

The building is, in fact, a church with seating for 5,000 worshippers, and Reeve relays to viewers that “by some estimates, there could be 400 million Christians in China in 30 years’ time, making it the biggest Christian nation on earth”.

Religion is a big story. Newsnight caused uproar among Conservative politicians last week with its decision to give a platform to the bloodthirsty UK-born Islamic State fanatic “Awlaki”, immediately after the murder of the US photojournalist James Foley, a story that dominated the news agenda.

And yet ITV has scaled back its religious programming from 104 hours in 2004, when it was under an obligation by the regulator Ofcom to cover the subject, to two hours in 2012, when it was not. Britain’s biggest commercial broadcaster believes there is no money in the genre. Other channels take a similar view.

Aaqil Ahmed, the BBC’s head of religion and ethics, is the only commissioning executive in British television with distinct responsibility in this area. At a time when religious disputes appear to be tearing much of the world apart, this seems like a serious shortcoming that leaves the audience deprived of information they need if they are to understand global politics and the cultures of their neighbours.

The BBC presenter Sian Williams, who hosted a debate on the subject at the Edinburgh International Television Festival last Friday, noted that a quarter of respondents to the 2011 census described themselves as being of “no religion”, up from 15 per cent a decade earlier. But this statistic is not in itself a good reason for television to turn away from religion. Williams hosts the popular Sunday Morning Live on BBC1. She has no religious allegiances and says her objectivity enables her to be curious of all faiths.

Roger Bolton, host of Radio 4’s listener response show Feedback and an experienced broadcaster, told the Edinburgh audience that “religious literacy has never been more important” but that the “potential of programmes in the field of religion … is far from being realised”. He is a trustee of the Sandford St Martin Trust, which gives awards for religious programmes but struggles to find entries. Like ITV, Channels 4 and 5 and Sky have all virtually abandoned the territory, he claims. “What we see, between 2007 and 2012, is a 35 per cent reduction in the amount of spending on what might be called religious programmes.”

But what exactly is a religious programme?

Polly Toynbee, columnist for The Guardian and vice-president of the British Humanist Association, argues that there should be no quotas for religious programmes or what she terms “advertorial for God”, saying that such an approach “breaks the impartiality of reporting”.

While Bolton and Ahmed happily include the BBC comedy Rev and Simon Schama’s The Story of the Jews in their roll call of successful religious programmes, Toynbee regards this as “cheating” when evaluating the need for the genre. “They’re just great programmes,” she says. Ahmed also claims Citizen Khan, another comedy, as a religious show and notes that the BBC2 series The Ottomans: Europe’s Muslim Emperors, presented by Rageh Omaar, was commissioned by the BBC’s religion and ethics department.

Rather alone on this issue, the BBC does 7,800 hours a year of “religious broadcasting”, the great majority on radio in the regions. More than 160 hours are carried on network BBC television.

Channel 4, as is its wont, does things differently. Religion is covered by its specialist factual team and “threaded” into the general output, says Ralph Lee, deputy chief creative officer. The coverage can be combustible. The 4Ramadan season in 2013 included a call to prayer that became the channel’s most complained-about broadcast of the year. The Sun splashed the story as “Ramadan a ding-dong”. But Lee said the series introduced a “generalised audience to what Ramadan meant” and was welcomed by many of Britain’s three million Muslims. He said the complaints were linked to the unfortunate timing of the long-planned season, so soon after the murder of soldier Lee Rigby, and mostly resulted from an online campaign by the English Defence League.

Tony Jordan is one of Britain’s most successful television writers, responsible for hits such as Life on Mars and Hustle as well as many memorable episodes from EastEnders. He is also a notable maker of religious programmes and always pitches for a mainstream audience. His drama The Nativity for BBC1 attracted five million viewers. Another of his biblical pieces, The Ark – in which Noah had four sons but one didn’t make it on to the boat – will run on BBC1 in prime time this autumn.

But most programme-makers do not have Jordan’s influence with channels.

The result is a decline and marginalisation of religious content, with TV primarily focusing on extremism. Memorable moments have included John Sweeney’s screaming fit in his Panorama probe of the Church of Scientology, and documentaries on the poisonous Muslim cleric Anjem Choudary or eccentric Christian communities such as the Hutterites.

Current affairs is inevitably drawn to radicalism and 80 per cent of programme-makers told the Edinburgh television festival that extremist subject matter in religious content draws better ratings.

We need to hear those extreme voices, such as the Islamic State’s odious Awlaki, to appreciate the danger they represent. But British television’s treatment of religion needs to go beyond the dangerous and the bizarre – to teach the audience about the contemporary world as well as the past.

This blog first appeared as an article in the Independent, 24 August 2014.

It was reported recently that the BBC is to move current Defence Correspondent Caroline Wyatt to Religion, replacing Robert Pigott who has held the post for a decade. Given Wyatt’s heavyweight role in Defence since 2007, this is seen as a beefing up of the religion brief. Some of us have argued for years that the BBC should appoint a Religion Editor – recognising the importance of religion as a factor in the world and how we understand it. This seems like a re-beefing up of the ‘correspondent’ role and goes some way to meeting the need.

Ironic, then, that it was reported only days later that the Times is to get rid of the Religion Correspondent role that has been occupied so successfully for 24 years by Ruth Gledhill. This means that no English newspaper has a journalist dedicated to covering religion as a specialism.

This is the context in which the Sandford St Martin Trust – which I chair – is changing. During the last year we have conducted a detailed strategy review and clarified that we wish not only to ‘promote excellence in religious broadcasting’, but also ‘to advocate for’ it. To this end we are changing the way we operate and are currently advertising for a part-time Executive Secretary to help us run the Trust and develop our ambitions.

The Trust gives prestigious awards each year, presented at a ceremony at Lambeth Palace, and with judging panels chaired by people who know their stuff. We have been developing our presence, especially through good work in social media and a new website, but our ambitions go well beyond this to both stimulate and engage in debate on religious broadcasting.

More will become clear as plans are developed. However, the point is that the religious broadcasting drum will continue to be banged – but more smartly as we invest in making a difference

See here for more information about the vacancy for a part-time Executive Secretary.

(First published at http://nickbaines.wordpress.com )

It’s only appropriate to begin a piece about religious broadcasting with a confession. I am guilty of the sin of pride. I won a Sandford St Martin Trust Award in 2012 for a documentary I made about Victorian bankers and am very proud of it – even though I did not actually think I was making a religious programme at the time.

In fact the documentary, When Bankers Were Good, opened with a shot of me standing in Canary Wharf shouting “BANKERS” at the top of my voice at the occupants of the financial buildings. It did not feel particularly reverent and I did not feel that I was auditioning for Songs of Praise.

But I had misunderstood the nature of the awards, which are designed to recognise programmes of all kinds that in some way take faith seriously. In our case it was the decision not to condescend to the believers of the past but to entertain the idea that their faith was indeed as important to them as they claimed, and that it may well have been the motivation for their extraordinary acts of philanthropy.

To look at some of the Quakers and Anglicans and Jews who were running the banking system 100 years ago and acknowledge that they had a system of beliefs and tried to live by a moral code was not exactly ground-breaking, but the contrast with the present-day bankers made their stories seem all the more remarkable. Or so the judges said.

And that is the point about these awards. They remind broadcasters operating in an often evangelically secular media environment that programmes that concern themselves with faith are still trying to engage with the world, rather than just trying to escape from it into the next. They can be current affairs as much as they can be history, and they can be arts programmes and books programmes and even comedy shows like the 2011 winner, Rev.

Admittedly they rarely overlap with the science department, but for range and quality they are often impressive. All of this is certainly true of the 2014 shortlist that makes an extremely strong case for putting such broadcasting at the heart – rather than the margin – of the schedules. All programme-makers are ultimately looking for good stories to tell. And audiences are looking for good stories to watch. And there are few richer repositories of stories than the world’s faiths and the extraordinary ways that human beings have attempted to find meaning through them.

Even if you disapprove of religion entirely it is difficult to resist, say, Simon Schama telling you why 20th-century Manhattan became the promised land for the exiled Jews of the diaspora, and why the classic musical expression of the American dream, Somewhere over the Rainbow, could only have been written by Jews in Tin Pan Alley. And this is just one tiny example from one programme from one series on the shortlist.

The public vote provides recognition that these stories are for a popular and not just a niche market, so as discerning readers of Radio Times, do vote as a reminder to the media powers that be that there is a significant body of viewers out there who appreciate this type of broadcasting.

Forgive the pride (again) but after the programme that won the award went out on television, I was told by a bemused young TV executive that “this stuff” did “surprisingly well” in the ratings. It should not have been a surprise. The one thing that broadcasters really should believe in is the audience.

First published in the Radio Times

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