Thurifer
When Channel 4 began it was a high-brow operation but seemed rapidly to embrace the low-brow. It has much to answer for its part in the infantilisation of popular culture and the debasement and vulgarisation of political discourse. The Channel has now ‘partnered’ with Benenden Health (once the Post Office Sanitorium Society, later the Civil Service Sanitorium Society – those were the days) whose strap-line is ‘This is healthcare done different’. I rest my case.
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In this oft times naughty, dark, and dismal world, it is too often a rare pleasure to see something that for a moment lifts the heart and brings an unbidden smile. Seen on a memorial stone in a country churchyard: Forbes Durrant Playfair: 13 September 1931 – 4th January 2021. In loving memory of a very fine gentleman.
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Languishing on my couch of bitter herbs and contemplating the transience of all earthly journeyings, I half-remembered words read long ago, and written even longer ago, by James Anthony Froude, in his book. End of the Medieval Age. Richard Hurrell Froude, that ill-fated denizen of the nascent Oxford Movement, was, by fifteen years, one of his siblings. The classic cadences of the younger Froude were even better than my imperfect memory of them: ‘For, indeed, a change was coming upon the world, the meaning and direction of which even still is hidden from us, a change from era to era. The paths trodden by the footsteps of ages were broken up; old things were passing away, and the faith and the life of ten centuries were dissolving like a dream. Chivalry was dying; the abbey and the castle were soon together to crumble into ruins; and all the forms desires, beliefs, convictions of the old world were passing away, never to return. A new continent had risen up beyond the western sea. The floor of heaven, inlaid with stars, had sunk back into an infinite abyss of immeasurable space; and the firm earth itself, unfixed from its foundations, was seen to be but a small atom in the awful vastness the universe. In the fabric of habit in which they had so laboriously built for themselves, mankind were to remain no longer. And now it is all gone–like an unsubstantial pageant faded; and between us and the old English there lies a gulf of mystery which the prose of the historian will never adequately bridge. They cannot come to us, and our imagination can but feebly penetrate to them. Only among the aisles of the cathedral, only as we gaze upon their silent figures sleeping on their tombs, some faint conceptions float before us of what these men were when they were alive; and perhaps in the sound of church bells, that peculiar creation of mediæval age, which falls upon the ear like the echo of a vanished world’.
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There are times when it is difficult not to regret that the Oxford Movement and the Catholic Revival are posited on the doctrine of the Apostolic Succession. Many things annoy and irritate me about bishops but the one that grates the most is when the appointment is announced how the candidate chosen by divine inadvertence and the Prime Minister says, invariably from the commanding heights of the burnished cliché, that they are ‘unworthy’ (apart from when they admit so as ‘unworthy servant’ in the Canon of the Mass). If they think that and if they are unworthy why do they not decline the increased stipend, the housing, the ancillary benefits and expenses and stay put where they would do more good and godly work? At a time when we have so many bishops, and considerably more per capita as the management consultants like to say, than in past decades, it leaves me to wonder.
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There was yet another splendid item on Today (the programme that keeps on giving) when a publican, whose hostelry straddled the English-Welsh border, was interviewed. In three minutes there was a full house of filler words: obviously 11; to be honest 4; sort of 4; you know 4. Total 23. Yet he was completely engaging.
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The succession of Morse, Lewis, and Endeavour came to an end before Easter. That they survived into this meretricious, shallow era of television is something of a miracle. There is now an almost endless choice of channels but so little of enduring quality and gravitas. It is also a minor miracle that their production values and the standard of acting remained consistently high and compelling. John Thaw (Morse) and Kevin Whately (Lewis) set a high water-mark. Following Morse’s heart attack outside the Chapel of Exeter College, and his death, Lewis took over and brought his own gifts to the task. Less cerebral than Morse but as dogged, not lacking in deductive capacity. Rather than continue chronologically, the final series enfleshing Colin Dexter’s characters, Endeavour (Morse’s long unrevealed Christian name – Evangelical parents, perhaps?) went back in time to a neophyte Morse: young, even more angular a character with all the quirks and traits present in embryo. Shaun Evans was a worthy predecessor. But the stroke of genius was to cast Roger Allam, as Chief Inspector Fred Thursday. He invariably shines in whatever he appears. He provided the ballast and experience to allow the young Morse to flourish in his idiosyncratic way. However much I admired the trilogy, my beating heart and loyalty still belong to Vera Stanhope. Vivat Vera.