What was the point of the Vicar of Dibley’s BLM sermon?
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
