More tea, vicar?

The Rev Byrony Taylor is making waves with her new book on vicars in television sitcoms. She even received a remarkably benign (for him) review from Damian Thompson who covered her book with a major article in the Mail. However Thompson chose not to follow Taylor’s thesis about how TV vicars are changing. Lamenting that the age of characters like Timothy Farthing (played by former General Synod-member Frank Williams and still with us in the new Dad’s Army movie) and Derek Nimmo of All Gas and Gaiters fame is over, Thompson argues that modern clergy are too boring and politically correct to inspire figures of comedy on TV. The Vicar of Dibley, he claims, was the most influential of telly vicars but she was the last of the line. Taylor takes a different view in her new book More TV Vicar (DLT). She claims that television has moved beyond sloppy stereotypes to create more believable Christian characters who are still funny. Her best example is the Rev Adam Smallbone in Rev who she describes as ‘the greatest revolution in on-screen Christians’. She likes the way Smallbone is seen talking with God and the fact that whenever Smallbone gets things right it is despite himself. Unlike Thompson, Taylor sees the Vicar of Dibley as part of the new wave and credits the series with helping to make women clergy acceptable. Why are clergy the subject of comedy? It’s because “they represent a world that is quite mysterious to many outsiders; they have a lot of comic potential because of the nature of what they do (dressing up in funny clothes, intoning funny words),” writes Taylor. She implies telly vicars are here to stay; Thompson thinks their day may be over. Time will tell. Certainly it is sad that Rev was cancelled after the third series.