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By

Carol Gould

Opinion

Religious broadcasting - the wave of creativity that is defying secularism

June 6, 2015 15:45
Pioneers: Desmond Wilcox and Esther Rantzen saw how vital religion should be  on TV (Photo: Getty Images)
3 min read

Many years ago, I had a testy conversation with a commissioning editor for what was called Religion and Talk. He is now a famous clergyman-broadcaster but at the time was at the helm of programming at one of the British television networks.

I had developed a concept with the late, great producer Desmond Wilcox about the three Abrahamic faiths inside a square mile of London. Desmond, his wife Esther Rantzen and I lived in the north west of the city and had come up with the idea of filming a year in the life of a rabbi, an imam, a Catholic priest and an Anglican vicar. Said the commissioning editor: ''I can't think of anything more boring than subjecting audiences to watching rituals and dreary clergymen. My wife is Jewish and I can tell you she would recoil in horror at the very idea of a series with rabbis.''

And so it was that we decided to defy the man from Religion and Talk. I will never forget having a telephone conference with Desmond one evening with Esther doing the washing up in the background and shouting suggestions, such as: ''We ought to confine the film to Lord's using the chapel there and the four places of worship in the immediate mile around the cricket ground.''

We went ahead with our project anyway; I raised money from various sources and eventually compiled our material, which we called Congregation NW8. It moves me to this day that, in the process of putting it together, I lost St John's Wood Synagogue's Rabbi John Rayner and Reverend John Slater as well as Desmond. But we did something in which we believed.