High praise for a unique and powerful virtual worship
When it comes to the coronavirus we’re currently overwhelmed with news and information, but meaning is harder to find. With places of worship ordered to close, nobody could even go to church on Sunday to try to make sense of the fear and looming disaster and to console one another in person. Despite a general decline in numbers of churchgoers, around a million people do still attend church regularly when there’s no lockdown in force. Radio did its best to fill the gap on Sunday morning with a special edition of Sunday
Worship (Radio 4, Sunday), which was also played out across all local radio networks and streamed on the Church of England’s Facebook page.
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, led the service. He was working from home, he assured us from the chapel at his official residence in Lambeth Palace, with the minimum possible number of people present. The music was provided by four singers from the choir of St Martin’s Voices, recorded separately in their church of St Martin in the Fields, “just up the river from here,” said Welby. “But it feels like they’re with me.”
And the four voices – presumably each standing two metres apart from one another, according to the current guidelines – began to sing together, in harmony, the hymn Lord of All Hopefulness. Standing in my kitchen at home, of course I burst into tears.
Like so many other people, I wasn’t able to see my mother on Mother’s Day, and it was hard. But the service made it feel less lonely.
Though Sunday Worship is on every Sunday, this was an unprecedented thing, broadcasting across so many different platforms and trying to reach the most people possible. Welby’s sermon was all about making communities even when the circumstances seem impossible.
Maybe it affected me so much because I’ve got a fondness for Archbishops of Canterbury – my grandfather was one, and the chapel at Lambeth Palace is where I was christened – but I think it was more than that. It was powerful radio, a moment of togetherness, consolation and hope that could help to push us on through the growing crisis.
Radio this week has continued to be a generally positive force in all sorts of imaginative ways. Though I can’t take too much LBC or BBC 5
Live just now, with their constant rolling updates of general confusion and doom, it’s very cheering to hear Petroc Trelawny on Radio 3 choosing a “March of the Day” at breakfast time while Match of the Day is off; and Radio 1 and Radio 2 were among the radio stations across Europe who all played out You’ll Never Walk Alone at the same time on Friday morning. Social distancing can’t eradicate emotional connection, after all, and radio is vital to keep it going strong.
And yet nobody has yet told the good people of Ambridge about the chaos we’re all facing, which means that The Archers (Radio 4, Sunday to Thursday) is still a coronavirus-free zone. I can’t work out whether it’s deeply strange, or a blissful escape from reality. Either way, trips to Ambridge are about to be rationed, as episodes are set to reduce from six per week to five, skipping the Friday episode and leaving a shortened Sunday omnibus, to attempt to spread out the release of the episodes already in the can and mitigate the difficulties in production caused by lockdown.
Which means no virus for now. Admittedly there’s not that much that’s blissful just now about life without Covid-19 in Borsetshire, even though the re-wilders were enjoying Champagne and pints of Shires on Monday in the only pub in England still apparently open for business as usual. More soberingly, Lynda Snell’s ongoing hospitalisation leaves her fate uncertain, and Kirsty’s seemingly cuddly fiancé, the builder Philip Moss (Andy Hockley), is actually turning out to be a colossal villain. The explosion at Grey Gables was caused by Philip’s labourer, Blake, switching on the grill in a bungled attempt to make himself some food because he was starving, having been kept by Philip in modern slavery conditions.
Yes, in a stunning coup de théâtre, Philip – that gentle birdwatcher and wearer of Christmas jumpers – is an evil gangmaster with Dickensian levels of malevolence. Until the coronavirus does strike Ambridge, it seems that Philip Moss is the real plague on Borsetshire.