Songs of Praise from the Calais migrant camp... with NO songs!
THE programme was billed as the most controversial episode of Songs of Praise in its 54-year history – straight from St Michael’s, the ramshackle church in the refugee camp outside Calais known as ‘the Jungle’.
How the BBC must have salivated at the prospect! Migrants – some desperately trying to slip illegally into the UK – singing pleading hymns to the Lord. Now that’ll prick the conscience of the nation. And what an embarrassment for the Government!
But within minutes of the opening sequence – dreadfully tacky compared to the soaring theme music of yesteryear – it was clear something had gone wrong.
How many hymns did the worshippers of St Michael’s sing in Songs of Praise? None. Not a single verse. In fact, not a single note.
Presenter Sally Magnusson raised expectations at the start of the programme. The congregation of St Michael’s have ‘clung to the thing most precious to them – their faith,’ she said.
Standing outside the tarpaulin-and-corrugated-iron church, she told us: ‘It’s clearly makeshift.’ Inside, eagle-eyed as ever, she correctly identified the altar.
But, significantly, we were given only a tiny glimpse of an actual service.
Did this have something to do with the fact that Father Hagos Kesete, the Eri- trean priest who runs St Michael’s, had reacted furiously to the Songs of Praise stunt, claiming that filming would endanger his family’s lives back home in Eritrea? The cameras had no right to be in the camp, he insisted.
Sally talked to Nima from Ethiopia, a Christian who admitted trying to enter the UK. ‘ Do you believe it’s right to go illegally to a country?’ she asked. ‘It’s not right, but what are we supposed to do?’ came the reply. Sally left it at that.
There was a Sudanese migrant called Daniel, who claimed to have fled the wartorn country after being persecuted for being protestant; he said he tried to cross the Channel every night ‘under trains’.
We did meet a clergyman. Alas, he wasn’t one of the migrant priests but – groan! – the Rev Giles Fraser, a veteran of BBC Radio 4’s Thought for the Day.
You may recall that Mr Fraser was the canon of St Paul’s who joined the ‘Occupy’ crowds outside the cathedral. He’s a professional Tory-basher in a dog collar.
There he was at the migrant camp, gesturing amid the rubble. ‘I just needed to express that they [the worshippers] were a part of me,’ he said. Which was nice for them. Mr Fraser, who helped organise the show, often feels this need to express himself – if there’s a camera in the offing. But that line was a little egotistical even by his standards.
So, instead of singing from St Michael’s, what did we hear?
Hymns and ‘worship songs’ – all dropped in between coverage of the camp – from a mixture of sedate English congregations and fired-up African Pentecostalists. None of them anywhere near Calais. There was also an interview with a trendy Christian songwriter and a piece about Shakespeare’s faith. Uh? These segments looked as if they’d been shoehorned in at the last minute, to bulk up the show.
From time to time the camera would pan back to Sally in ‘the Jungle’, where she spoke to sincere English and French Christian volunteers ‘coming to the help of these destitute people’.
One lady wanted to bring them ‘the light of the Gospel’. Good luck with that.
Sorry to sound cynical, but the script glossed over one rather inconvenient but unavoidable fact about the camp: it is overwhelmingly Muslim.
Also – and I wonder if anyone at the Beeb knew this – St Michael’s is Ethiopian Orthodox.
In that ancient community they don’t actually sing anything we’d recognise as a hymn. By the time the final credits rolled, this ‘historic’ episode of Songs of Praise – in reality, just another opportunistic exercise in conscience-tweaking – had collapsed like a dodgy sponge on the programme that preceded it, The Great British Bake Off.
And thank heavens for that.
‘An exercise in conscience-tweaking’