A Vicar’s Life
BBC TWO, 8.30PM
This amiable new series follows several vicars in their parishes in the Diocese of Hereford, the most rural in the Church of England. It’s a heart-warming mixture of births, marriages and deaths – or as likeable Reverend Matthew Stafford, vicar at the village of Much Wenlock, says: “hatched, matched and dispatched” – but, for all that sense of familiarity, it’s well-made and very engaging.
This opening episode sees Matthew officiate at a lovely local wedding, and Reverend Nicholas Lowton, the Rural Dean of Abbeydore and Vicar of the Black Mountains Group, deal with the theft of the parish registry books (“whoever did this has got lessons that they need to learn”). Elsewhere, Reverend Ruth Hulse, Team Vicar for West Hereford, organises a funeral for much-loved former churchwarden Barbara. “It’s a huge loss, like losing a member of your own family,” she says.
Everyone involved comes across well, and Matthew manages to sneak a message in amid the jokes: “I don’t take myself seriously, but I do take God and what I do very seriously,” he notes. So do his parishioners, many of whom admit that he’s helped them see the church in a favourable light. Sarah Hughes