Being a bit of a show-off was ‘God’s calling’
Gogglebox vicar Kate Bottley talks to Peter Stanford about her new, serious role
Kate Bottley is best known as the Gogglebox vicar in the Bafta-winning Channel 4 show that watches people watching TV. We are used to seeing her clasped to a mug of tea, wearing novelty slippers and espousing her trademark forthright views on everything from the latest David Attenborough wildlife programme to a water-cooler TV soap moment, but today, the lively 41-year-old is instead describing going to the Field of Blood, where a Greek orthodox monastery stands where Judas died.
If this is a swerve from what we have come to expect from this bubbly vicar, it’s because Reverend Kate Bottley has just returned from Jerusalem, where she has been filming a “proper” documentary for the BBC on the New Testament’s ultimate traitor, Judas Iscariot.
“I was all in black, all vicary and rev’d up,” she says. “But the grumpy old nun in charge said, ‘We have no need for women of the likes of her.’” The memory makes her laugh out loud, the same down-to-earth, warm Yorkshire chuckle that has won her so many fans.
The forthcoming programme is already being much discussed, with prominent clerics including a Church of England bishop lending their voices to calls for a reappraisal of the disciple who betrayed Jesus, leading to his crucifixion.
To have Bottley presenting a documentary examining theories about what led him to betray Jesus was guaranteed to bring a new element to the debate. Women vicars are still just about novel enough to get the odd sideways glance when they are out and about in their dog-collar, but the diminutive Bottley attracts more attention than most because she likes to pair it up with polka-dot dresses and high heels. Shoes are her weakness, she says, and today’s choice is a pair of red Seventies platforms.
“I’m only five foot,” she explains. “You’ve got to do everything you can.”
She did, however, tone it down during her trip to Jerusalem for her programme, which will present Judas as a tragic figure, a “mirror to the human condition”.
“It’s a conservative place, so I was expecting hostility to me as a woman dressing up as a priest.”
Yet apart from the one disapproving nun, the response this colourful woman of the cloth got was the exact opposite. “There was one group of Roman Catholic pilgrims, who crossed the road, dropped to their knees, and asked me to bless them. I was the first woman priest they’d ever met.”
Rev Kate’s status as a modern poster girl for formal religion seems to be going both ecumenical and global. A former RE teacher from Sheffield, hers was a late-ish vocation. She went to the seminary – “Hogwarts with cassocks” is how she describes it – when her children, daughter Ruby and son Arthur, were small.
Ordained in 2010, she is currently vicar of Blyth, Scrooby and Ranskill, former mining towns in north Nottinghamshire, as well as chaplain to the local FE college – “you know, plumbers, plasterers, hairdressers, those sort of people”. Her first 15 minutes of fame came in 2013 when, while officiating on the altar at a wedding in her parish church, she also led a flash mob in the aisles to the strains of Nineties hit Everybody Dance
Now. It went viral, attracting 6.3 million viewers and ending up on the national news bulletins.
Which is when the Gogglebox producers came knocking at the vicarage door. What persuaded her to say yes? “People say to me, ‘you’re just like Dawn French’ [in The Vicar of
Dibley], but she’s not a vicar. She’s an actress. I thought it was a chance to show that vicars are normal people.
Twice a week, when the series is running, the cameras come to record the banter as Rev Kate and her violin teacher husband Graham curl up on the sofa in front of the TV. She is known for the speed and wit of her one-liners. She once memorably labelled James Bond actor Daniel Craig “a sexy Tintin”.
But it is exposure carefully controlled by this canny cleric: “I’m not daft. I’ve got theology degrees under my belt.” She won’t, for example, allow her children to be filmed and has cut down visits by the cameras to allow her daughter to focus on her forthcoming GCSEs.
A Low Church Anglican evangelical, Rev Kate was the first in her family to go to university – her mum was a dinner lady and her dad a steel worker – and says that she only realised that Leeds Trinity was a Catholic college when she arrived. “Four years there stood me in good stead. I now feel at home in all sorts of Christian traditions.”
She is also perfectly able to hold her own in any debate on theological issues of the day. She is a keen supporter of gay marriage and would love to officiate at one in her church, but it is not allowed by the Church of England. “I took an oath of canonical obedience and I would never go against canon law. The way things change within the church is by people staying within it, asking questions and moving things on.”
What makes her different is where she has those conversations. Not at General Synod, or in the Church
Times, but on prime-time television. Which hasn’t been without controversy – more conventional clerics have claimed that she is dumbing down her vocation.
“When I was ordained, I presumed I was going to have to water myself down,” she says. “But it’s almost as if God has said, ‘Oh you’re a bit of a show-off, are you? All right then, let’s use that.’ God calls all sorts of people to serve him. We need people who are introverted, quiet vicars, but we also need people who are extroverts and who don’t think it through.”
She confesses that sometimes she goes too far. “Do I have a filter? Yes. Does it always work? No, but I am a priest first. So when I sit down at the bedside of someone in my parish who’s dying, that person just needs me to be a priest in that moment. That’s what my calling is.”
By her side always is Graham, who she met aged 13. She even started going to church because she’d seen him at school in Sheffield, fancied him and had been told he was the vicar’s son. “God had the last laugh – I only went for a boyfriend and ended up with a dog collar. We’ve been married 18 years this year.”
Happily, it seems. “The other week we went out. I went to the bar and only got back to me seat about an hour later (she is stopped a lot by fans) – Graham had gone home.”
So is her documentary on Judas a first step into serious presenting? The idea tickles her. “Obviously the subject is serious, but I’d like to think I bring my own version of it.
“I was wandering up the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem, and I found myself saying, ‘Oh look, they sell Bounty bars here.’ And that’s when I’m meant to be following in the footsteps of Christ. I am what I am. God called me as me. So I’m not about to pretend to be Melvyn Bragg or Lucy Worsley.”
In the Footsteps of Judas, presented by Kate Bottley, is on BBC 1 on Good Friday
‘People say to me, “You’re just like Dawn French” – but she’s not a vicar’