The first rule of preaching is not to be preachy – and it’s here that the Vicar of Dibley slips up in lecturing her parishioners on Black Lives Matter in an episode broadcast last night.
When I am training curates, I show them Alan Bennett’s skit ‘Take a pew’ from Beyond the Fringe (1961), where a clergyman’s painful attempts at being hip are sunk by the rising of his sing-songy parsonical voice. Dawn French’s character would have been wise to watch too. The normally inoffensive sitcom, which is being broadcast this Christmas in a series of ten minute specials, features the TV vicar ‘taking the knee’. Surely this year, more than ever, we could have done without sermonising like this in a sitcom.
Some sympathetic clergy are, of course, scrambling to the programme’s defence, proclaiming that this is ‘the’ Christmas sermon we all need to hear.
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