See you in Two Weeks

I'm off on holiday for a fortnight, so I'll be offline for that period. While I'm away, why not have a look at these links?

Ally Gordon's written some great stuff on his blog about Christ and Culture. It's called 'Beyond Air Guitar'. Go read.

Also, you should probably read this - by David Field. Awesome and very useful.

Clayton TV has just launched. It's sort of Christian telly. It emanates from Newcastle.

Some robust stuff about how the State in the West has seriously overplayed its hand here. Prepare to be furious (whatever your politic views, it'll make you cross - either at the issues or the site)

The best radio anywhere in the world is called This American Life and it's here.

Funny stuff at The Onion. Enjoy. Some rude bits. But generally fine and joyous.

Enjoy. See you in July.

Third Way Website

The Third Way website is finally up and running. Lots of opportunities to leave comments and get involved in the debate.

My latest column is here. It's about some recommended summer reading (a bunch of book jokes, by and large). Apologies in advance of the picture of me. I don't look like that. But given how well my articles go down in Third Way (you should have seen the mail bag after my article on the NHS), I'm more than happy with the anonymity.

Bookrabbit

If you're into books, which you almost certainly are, you might want to hook up with these guys. I just have. It's a community for bibliophiles, I guess. It's called Bookrabbit. Have a look.

God and Big Brother

Here's the bones of a talk I gave at a school this morning.

If you brought someone back from five hundred years ago, and you showed them concept of television, they’d be amazed. Moving pictures! That don’t take years to paint using crushed up egg shells and oil. Imagine what Henry VIII would have made of the television. On this magic box, he could watch stories, programmes, films from all over the world beamed into your house. Documentaries about the Wilderbeest on the plains of the Serengetti. Films made people in Mexico or Mozambique. The latest news from events in Singapore or Hong Kong.

I think Henry VIII would be surprised that the biggest event in television in the last ten years is Big Brother.

Henry VIII: So, what do you all gather round to watch?
You: Big Brother.
Henry VIII: Big Brother? A programme about Monks and monasteries from all over the world and how they pray and go about their daily lives…
You: No, it’s just people in house. They sit there. We watch them. Say which ones we don’t like…
Henry VIII: And they’re executed?
You: No. They leave. Whoever’s left after about three months wins.
Henry VIII: Oh. Are they nice people?
You: No. Not really.

When you think about it like this, Big Brother sound pretty rubbish. In fact, many of us didn’t need persuading it sounded rubbish. But Big Brother is a very powerful idea. The symbol is that eye. The all-seeing eye. Representing the fact that cameras are everywhere. Big Brother sees everything. And then shows it to anyone who’s prepared to sit through it.

In Big Brother, there are no secret places. No hidden nooks or crannies. If you’re in the Big Brother house, you are being watched.

Some people feel that way about God. God sees everything. There are no secret places. No hidden nooks or crannies. Wherever you go in the universe, you are being watched.

According to Psalm 139, that’s right.

O LORD, you have searched me and you know me.
You know when I sit and when I rise;
you perceive my thoughts from afar.
You discern my going out and my lying down;
you are familiar with all my ways.
Before a word is on my tongue
you know it completely, O LORD.

God is the only person in the world who has read every blog on the internet. He knows everything that could be known about all of us. The big question is how we respond to that.

Maybe it scares you. This fact makes you want to run away and hide. In fact, David thinks along those lines in verse 7: "Where can I go from your spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there? If I make my bed in the depths, you are there."

On the moon! In the oceans! God is there. You can’t get away from him. Sometimes, if you tie something to a pet, like a ribbon, they freak out and try and run away from it, but don’t realise it’s attached to them. I imagine David like that running. Running screaming 'Arggh!' with God behind him and in front of him every step of the way.

But why would we want to run away from God? Why would we want privacy in the Big Brother house? The reason is because none of us likes to be on show all the time, because if they knew everything about us, they wouldn’t like us so much. They’d see what we're really like. Nasty, selfish, fickle people. And we think they won’t want to know us any more.

Well here’s the amazing thing. God knows everything about us. He knows the content of every text we’ve ever sent. He knows what we write in our secret diaries. He saw us do the things we write about in our diaries. And he still wants to know us. God knows what we think about him, but he still reaches out to us. To you. He still welcomes us into his family. Into his kingdom. He gives us his son Jesus so he could show us what he’s like.

Which way are we running? If you’re towards God, you’ll be able to understand what David means when he ends the Psalm – ‘lead me in the way everlasting’. If you’re running towards God, he will lead you every step of the way. He’s give you his Spirit to help you run. He’s given you Jesus, his Son, to show you what that life looks like. Keep running.

If you’re running away from God, where are you running to? Where is there in the universe where God can’t find you? You can take a rocket to Mars and he’ll see you. You can live in underground tunnels and he’ll be there.

But more importantly, who do you think you’re running from? God, the God of the Psalms, of the whole Bible, is not a vindictive taskmaster, like Big Brother, who makes you do arbitrary activities in exchange for food or treats. He takes no delight in your failures and falls, like the audience of Big Brother. He’s even sent his own Son, Jesus Christ, to earth to die on a cross so that those failures and falls don’t need to matter any more. Most of all, he wants you to stop running, turn around and see him standing there, welcoming you with open arms.

Comedy is Character, not jokes.

Today, I posted some thoughts on my Hut 33 blog, here. It's about how comedy is all about writing characters.

Here's the first part:
Episode 4 in Hut 33 is called ‘Where Boffins Dare’. The episode was, in fact, the sixth and last one to be written and recorded in the series. Like most final episodes in a series of six, it was of a frantic scramble to get written in time. You might think that the last episode is the hardest to write because you’re all out of ideas and have to scratch your head for weeks to find something for the characters to do – that you haven’t done before. This can be the case on individual jokes. Eg. Minka’s silent entrances need a different joke each time. Coming up with three or four is tricky. A fifth and then a sixth is really hard work.

Hearing Voices
Overall, however, Episode Sixes, as a rule, tend to get written fairly quickly. This is normally because Episodes One to Five take longer to write than you’d planned. But the shortage of time for Episode Six http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifis not a disaster by any means. Having written five episodes in the series already, you find you’re writing faster and more ‘in character’ from the start. As a result, your Draft 1 is probably as strong as your Draft 2 on Episode One or Two. As the writer of the whole series, you’ve learnt the lessons again about what’s funny and what isn’t. You’ve re-learned the mechanics of writing radio comedy – and how that differs from television, prose and everything. Also, you can ‘hear’ the voices of all the characters almost instantly – and these voices sometimes lead you away from where you’re wanting to go in any particular scene. So you just have to follow the voices.

Being able to ‘hear’ the voices of your characters in response to any given subject is very important. If you can, you know you’ve got a show that stands a chance of being a success. I was once given some very good advice a long time ago by Gareth Edwards, a BBC producer and thoroughly decent human being. He said...

To read on, go to the Hut 33 blog here.

It's all relative. Well, not all. But a lot is.

Yesterday, I gave a talk to the startled several at the Churches Media Council. It was a fringe session that I offered to do on comedy, religion and offence. The session was entitled 'A Rabbi, A Priest and an Imam go into a bar...'. I hope to write a book under that title, but I fear that's a long way off. (Feel free to commission me. Will write for money.) I agreed to do a talk on the subject to force me into ordering my thoughts on this whole tricky area, since another comedy scandal is no doubt just around the corner. So here's a new thought that's come up in my thinking on the subject.

It addresses the question "Well, you wouldn't tell that joke to your grandmother, so why would you tell it to me?". This implies that if you can't tell a joke in one context, you cannot tell it in any context. This is totally false. Why? Because comedy is relative. It is relative because it is relational. The person telling a joke is a thinking, feeling being. He is telling a joke to a thinking feeling being. And he may well be telling a joke about a third person - who is also a thinking feeling being. I make this point at length here.

What is the consequence of this? Comedy seems to be relative. And this makes many Christians uncomfortable since it appears to make morality relative. We return to the theme of the evangelical dislike of ambiguity. We don't want anyone to think we're post-modernists, so we embrace - too hard - modernism. Modernism doesn't do relativism. The thing is Post-Modernism may be a sticky blob of marshmallow that you can't get a grip on, but Modernism is a freezing block of steel that you wouldn't want to touch and probably couldn't even lift.

The reality is that we talk to different people in different ways - and that's appropriate. Jesus talked to Pharisees one way, his disciples another and widows yet another. That said, he talked to Nicodemus differently from other members of the ruling class. And he was pretty tough on the woman at the well. He spoke as the situation required. And used humour, stereotype and wordplay accordingly. But to say to Jesus 'You wouldn't have told that parable to a bunch of widows, so why do you think you can tell it to the pharisees?' is simply a dumb question. But that is what we are saying when we judge a comedian's joke from a context to which the joke is not intended.

The global village we live in makes 'context-crashing' very possible. (NB: I just made up that word 'Context-crashing'. You heard it here first.) Imagine a comedian tells a joke in a comedy club in London about a particular facet of Islam that he finds distateful or bizarre. It is captured on a video phone by Audience Member A, emailed to a friend in Saudi Arabia and is played on Al-Jazeera the next day. The joke, on Al-Jazeera, seems so beyond the pale, the comedian is roundly criticised for his cultural insensitivity. How could he have told a joke that's so offensive? That people have to sit through in their own living rooms on Al-Jazeera! It is an offence! Totally unjustifiable!

The point is this. The joke has been context-crashed. The comedian would never have told that joke if he'd been making a TV show for Al-Jazeera. Or he might have put it differently, or nuanced it in some way. Who is the villain of the peace? The Audience member for capturing the joke and emailing it. Partly. The person who sent it to Al-Jazeera. Yes. And the 'experts' in the studio for having such a naive view of how culture, communication and comedy work.

It's happened before. It'll happen again. So look out for it.

Big Brother's Unreality

Big Brother in the papers? It must be June. Another long dreary season of Big Brother stretches before us like a bout of German Measles. There used to be ten contestants. Now there are sixteen for us to lose interest in, as they desperately do anything to increase their chances of winning - or at least securing a media career on the basis of sitting in a house for quite a long time under constant surveillance (which of course presupposes that anyone is watching).

As a concepts for a show go, it immediately sounds interesting. A blank canvas of excitement - like Second Life or Youtube - and I remember the excitement nine years ago. I even remember rushing back from doing our show at the Edinburgh Festival to watch Craig challenge Nasty Nick on cheating and he walked. Memorable television. (It was also the day that England beat the West Indies at cricket inside two days. The day that Caddick took four wickets in an over, I think)

But as the show grows and one thinks about it more and more, it rapidly becomes an unpleasant prospect. Contestants are hawking their personality - or public persona - for the favour of the nation and a media career. And it's here that the problem really starts, not least because it's still labelled Reality Television.

Big Brother might argue that it's open to the public and you get so see how this people behave in groups and under pressure. You get to know what people are really like. No. Big Brother applicants are a certain, distorted demographic - no more or less valuable than any other group in society - but they are primarily young, happy with constant surveillance, hungry for fame and able to present a caricature of themselves in some way. Plus have time on their hands to write off in a house over the summer. What's more, from the thousands of applicants, only the visually interesting, hungriest, wackiest and most caricatured - and/or caricaturable - get selected. Plus the show only selects people to go into a group that will make the relationships interesting. Then they are put through a series of contrived tests, arbitrarily pitted against one and another and then the public who happen to be paying attention on that day vote on who they want to leave the show. This is many things - but it is not reality.

A Busload of Quakers

On Tuesday, I wrote this on my other blog - about a teetotal joke that I wrote on my radio sitcom.

Submitting to Authorities

I've been looking at Romans 13 recently. You know the one - "v1 Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. v2 Consequently, he who rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves."

It's striking that Paul does not qualify or moderate his teaching here. And yet that is our instinct - to leap an qualify when we do and when we do not submit to government authority citing the apostles in Acts who have to obey God rather than men. Clearly there are exceptions to Christian submission to authority - but none of them can be found in Romans 13.

This seems particularly surprising when one considers that the authorities in Rome, as today, were relatively vile and self-regarding. The emperor considered himself to be a god and to be treated as such. Paul would have known the story of Daniel extremely well and how Shadrach, Meschach and Abednego refused to bow down and worship the king as a God. But he doesn't bring it up here. Why not?

Perhaps it was self-evident. Of course you're not going to bow down and worship the emperor. That much is obvious. What was the greatest danger for the Roman Christians? It appears to be considering themselves in some way above the law. A new Christian in Rome, who has encountered the True and Living God in Christ, might think "I know God! He tells me what to do. Not authorities and magistrates." Wrong, says Paul. No. You obey authorities because they've been put there by God. Instituted by Him and administering justice on His behalf.

This grates, doesn't it? Because we look at our version of justice, our law-courts, our judges and our laws and they seem so feeble, flimsly and, well, wrong. But we are not at liberty to defy them. We may protest peacefully and legally. We may blog or debate. But we don't set aside. We obey, as a child obeys his flawed father, and a slave his harsh master. We obey.

For those of us who believe the governments in the West have seriously over-played their hand, and seek far more honour, respect and taxation than they are due, we need to hear this. And remember to cheerfully obey the authorities.

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On a related note, I heard a sermon on this passage online the other day and was interested that the preacher began, as you might expect, with the qualifiers and caveats of submitting to the authorities, rather than explaining the actual passage. I don't think anyone had a problem with his doing this, but it worries me when we take a passage and start digging it up before we've actually had a good look at it.

It happens quite a lot in evangelical circles. We get to a passage that seems to flatly contradict something we all hold dear, so we say 'obviously this passage doesn't apply to this or that' because giving the passage a good run for its money. (This happens with baptism in Romans 6 in my opinion. Some say 'obviously this isn't referring to actual baptism' and yet it does say 'baptism'. You could equally say 'when this passage talks about homosexuality, it's not referring to consensual, lifelong relationships'. At that point, evangelists start saying 'look at the text! look at the text!)

So I look at Romans 13:1-7 and, despite a sermon full of qualifiers and caveats, the passage has none. None. Not one. Zero. So why give a sermon which does? Surely the passage is teaching us to cheerfully and dutifully submit. And let's be honest, the vast majority of the time, we can and we should.

A Couple of Films to Watch

My wife and I watch quite of a lot of TV. We like TV. We like American programmes that last twenty two minutes, once you've removed the commercials (very easy skipping through them on Sky Plus - which is worth every penny to us, at least). In particular, we watch My Name is Earl and Scrubs. But recently, we've managed to watch a couple of movies and I would recommend both of them.

Thank You for Smoking is a really interesting, stylish film about a man (Aaron Eckhart) who works for the tobacco lobby. Bags of charm. Engaging and funny. Sometimes a little shocking, but the general amorality of the piece is both intentional and provokative, without being needlessly over-sensational. There were a couple of plot problems, but at the end of the film, part of me really wished I'd written it. (At the end of watching The Dish, I always wish with every part of me that I had written it)

The Painted Veil is a slower period piece, based on a book by W Somerset Maugham. Set in 1925, a man asks a woman to marry him, which she duly does, mainly to get away from her father, or to spite him. They then move to China where her husband (Edward Norton) is a cholera specialist. But she is unfaithful to him - and it destroys their marriage very quickly, but most of them film is how they very slowly and painfully peace things back together. It's great to see a film about marriage which is real about the pain of adultery, and the heroism of marriage.