On The Telly

Urgent phone call this morning: Anglia TV want to film the building extension we’ve had done at the ecumenical church I serve. Glad my Catholic colleague (the Catholics funded it all) rang me to invite me to attend, along with his deacon and the Anglican priest. Caused diary problems, though. My wife is ill with the flu, and I said I’d do the school run rather than be on TV. But she got another mum to pick up our daughter. So I made it, and should be on the regional news tomorrow night.

Having said that, we were mostly filmed looking admiringly at the building inside and outside, rather as if we’d never seen it before – one of those TV news fictions, a convention whereby TV reports the truth by staging a fiction. They then interviewed Father Frank as our spokesperson – entirely the right choice, and I think he did a good job.

There was a time when I would have rushed to get my face on the telly. Today I felt ambivalent. But I did it for two reasons. One was that Father Frank asked me. There had been an unfortunate communication breakdown two weeks ago when a local paper wanted to cover the rededication service. Phone messages didn’t get through to me for me to turn up to that photo call. Frank went out of his way to involve me. It was important to honour his generous spirit. The other reason was that I hope it goes some small way to show that the story of today’s church is not all decline.

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