BBC's 'The Passion' DVD due out.

Evangelism UK reports that the BBC's production of The Passion (which was very good until the last 2 minutes) is available on DVD. Not strictly true - it comes out in October, but you can pre-order it now. Follow the this link for some episode reviews and links from earlier in the year.


Staying with the BBC, I will continue to stick up for Bonekickers even though everyone else seems to hate it. Ok it's all a load of cobblers, but so are most of the books in the summer bestsellers list. Since the 'Da Vinci Code', there has been a massive splurge of 'historical religious fiction' which all combine some modern day murder mystery with a secretive medieval/early Christian sect protecting a secret which will destroy the church if it comes out. Or variations thereon. Reading the appendix of The First Apostle is nearly enough to make Dan Brown come across as a scrupulous historian.



Where was I? Oh yes, next weeks Bonekickers finale is set in Glastonbury, just up the road from here. I like the way this is moving: Hot Fuzz was set in Wells (our nephew, visiting from Singapore, wanted to visit Wells not for the Cathedral, Bishops Palace or anything else, but just to see the place where the film was set. Cue anguished wailing from heritage types), Bonekickers is now moving down the A37 from Bath to Glastonbury, so it's only a matter of time before we get a major production set in Yeovil. Or not.

BBC Passion - Episode 4

If the mark of a good TV drama is that you carry on talking about it long after it's finished, then the BBC's Passion was a good TV drama. Several other people have reviewed the final episode, broadcast on Sunday evening, here are a few thoughts:

The initial thought was of the weirdness of it. Mary, and then the 2 disciples on the road to Emmaus (interestingly shown as bottling it and making up a good story for why they're running away), meet with a strange man with a beard. He doesn't look any more like Jesus than any of the other disicples, but talks and acts like him. Suddenly, as he passes round the bread, he's turned into Joseph Mawle, and it is Jesus. It's a clever way of doing the 'disciples didn't recognise him' thing, but also incredibly confusing. We never see the wounds of Jesus, and with the different actors you're initially led to think that the programme is going to bottle out of a geniunely resurrected Christ. But then there he is. It takes you through some of the confusion and bewilderment the disciples must have felt, which is quite clever. Or weird. Or both.

Other pluses were the rounding out of Joseph of Arimethea, who comes into his own in this episode, and the sense of life carrying on as normal even as the amazing things were happening just outside Jerusalem. I don't know if the soldiers popping off for their breakfast butties and missing the resurrection was an intentional comic touch, but it just made me think of Chris and Ray in Ashes to Ashes.... The disciples remained believable, bickering and slowly starting to melt away, with a very different Peter to the bluff loudmouth he's usually made out to be.

Slightly less satisfactory was the shoehorning of various resurrection appearances into strange places. Peter at the pool of Bethesda has the encounter that the Gospels say happened with Thomas, and then the words spoken to him by Jesus on the beach at Galilee at the end of Johns gospel. Words and phrases keep happening in places where they didn't happen. If you don't know the gospel stories, it probably all makes perfect sense, but if you do know them then there's a lot of mental sorting out to do! I also wondered why the programme needed to do that, and why we couldn't have, for example, the encounter with Thomas as the gospels tell it.

The other thing it lacks, as the first episode did, is power. The disciples aren't sad anymore, but there's no explosion of dynamism or excitement at having Jesus back. The fact that Jesus himself is pretty chilled about the whole business probably affects this, but you're still left wondering how this random rabble turned into the powerhouse that was the early church.

One or two other things didn't sit right: the crucifixion of Jesus in the middle of nowhere, rather than on a main road (the gospels talk about passers by, and a bit of a crowd at the site rather than a small detail of soldiers and 2 women), and why Mary would have thought Jesus was the gardener if the burial site was in the side of a desert cliff, as it was shown here.

The comments bit of the BBC site is very positive about the whole thing, a lot of people saying their faith has been encouraged and strengthened by it. Brilliant, I think on the whole it's been a good telling of the story. Provocative without being predicatable, and yes there are plenty of bones to pick, but you can't argue with the core of what was broadcast, and the fact we get a resurrected Jesus at the end of it.

Continuity? What Continuity?

By the time Joseph Mawle's Jesus had breathed his last, there was nowhere else to go. It was a desolate death, in the wilderness, perfunctory, bloody, horrible. The screen went black. The credits rolled in respectful silence.

Then the continuity announcer cut in.

Why? Why? WHY?

Within a minute there had been a trailer for another programme, then Ben Bradshaw was giving us the news headlines. We switched off, and for 10 minutes just sat there in silence. Nothing else seemed right.

Why do we have to fill our lives with noise? The bookies opening on Good Friday is a straw in the wind - we just don't know how to stop, to quiet ourselves, to face pain and suffering. Easter Saturday is the day we live in, every day. Between death and resurrection. The bloody now and the hoped-for not-yet. The disciples, tellingly, are portrayed as itching to get back to Galilee, to give up, run away, and not face things. But they stay. They get their heads down and stick it out.

The way the BBC is telling the story makes us wait 48 hours for the resurrection. The question is, what do we do in the waiting?

The Passion episode 2

Superb.

Everything is slotting into place, and 30m where (seemingly) not a lot happens all builds an incredible sense of anticipation and foreboding. Some brilliant scriptwriting too:

Caiaphas: "I would rather sacrifice one man and save Judea"

and a fantastic scene by the river where Jesus spells out that he's going to die, and then be raised again. We're so used to hearing those words, that we don't clock how cloud-cuckoo they might have sounded to the disciples. It's clear, in a very understated way, that they think he's starting to lose it, and that he'll just die and that will be it. Their fear comes across powerfully, and Johns anger at having given up family, business and a life in Galilee only for Jesus to go and get himself killed is scorchingly real. Lots of familiar words of Jesus get brought to new life in this exchange: 'those who give up their life will find it.' Great stuff. A similar job is done on a series of teachings in the temple, linking together the rich, the righteous, the last being first etc., but all taught as though Jesus is doing it off the cuff, in response to what he's seeing and hearing.

Even the 2 mugger/murderers from episode 1 slot into place: sentenced to crucifixion by Pilate, we'll be seeing them again next to Jesus on Friday. There's also something starting to go on with Mrs Pilate - just a glance exchanged at a distance with Jesus, but the economy of this production is such that that's all you need. Simmering nicely, I'm really looking forward to the next bit.

The BBC comments section is positively brimming with praise. As long as Jesus gets more praise in the end than the Beeb......!!

The Passion, Episode 1

Richard Frank has already posted a good review of this, nearly all of which was stuff I was going to write. The comments section on the Passion website is up and running on last nights episode, and Mark Goodacres blog links to the media reviews which are coming in, all of which look pretty positive. The main fly in the ointment is the Telegraph/Mail axis trying to stoke a 'row' story which is basically non-existent, but it must be hard getting used to a TV portrayal of Jesus which doesn't play it for controversy.

I must admit I found last nights episode hard to get into. There was certainly a great feel and look to the production, but with every disciple looking dishevelled and bearded, it was hard to tell who any of the main characters were, let alone the various extras introduced into the story from the side, like the 2 men murdering someone in a bazaar and dumping him in a vat of red dye.

Once the characters had been introduced, it started to settle down nicely. There aren't any hysterics here, all the characters are pretty believable. The story is told around the axis of Jesus-Caiaphas-Pilate. Pilate wants the festival season to go quietly to keep him in Tiberias' good books, Caiaphas resents Pilates power in Jerusalem, and wants to show that he can manage his own people, and Jesus is one of several flies in their mutual ointment.

The portrayal of Jesus by Joseph Mawle is excellent - he teaches as he walks, engages with people, and has a combination of depth, mischief and wisdom. I'm slightly less sure about the hand this Jesus is dealt by the script: there is a lot of stuff about everyone being brothers together - a gospel of inclusion that could have come straight of out of the New Labour Bible - and about the Kingdom of God being in people's hearts. At the pool of Bethesda, Jesus and the disciples busy themselves mopping the brows of the sick and crippled. But where's the power? Where is the message of God doing something new? There was more to Jesus message than teaching universal brotherhood to a culture blinded by prejudice and social stratification.

The series plausibly recreates the rising anxiety of the Temple authorities at the actions and words of Jesus, and it's precisely because Jesus doesn't show his hand that they get worried. If he was clear about his aims, everyone would know where they stood, but this interpretation makes a plausible case for the authorities getting edgy based on Jesus ambiguity, rather than his direct Messianic claims and powerful and crowd-pulling miracles.

The disciples, Judas excepted, are background figures, a forest of beards in a bearded world. I think I could pick out John (or was it James?) from his face, and Matthew from his Welsh accent, but can't recall a single reference to Peter, which is a bit odd. More is made of the 2 Mary's, and of a repentant female prostitute, in order to add some female voices to the mix.

So I wasn't blown away by it, but not massively put off by it either. Regional accents aside, it's trying to do justice to the historical setting, the political balance of power, and how Jesus teaching and actions would have played against that setting. The fact that it feels like an alien world is maybe a good thing - it is an alien world, 2000 years and several cultures away. Trying to make it too much like culture we know makes the gospels tell our story, rather than their own.

Finally, the other striking thing was the sheer ordinariness of it all. Jesus teaching comes across as real stuff said to real people, rather than holy writ. The crowds around him aren't massive, and his entry on a donkey is a journey of a couple of hundred yards before he gives the donkey away (a nice touch) and the crowd dissolves. You don't get the sense that these are events that made history, which is what makes them so much more plausible. Barabbas aside, nobody is black and white: perhaps the least appealing is the disciple who keeps whipping his dagger out at every available interval, but these are all people with recognisable human responses and characters. Trouble is, they also have recognisable faces from other TV dramas! We had several 'oh it's so and so from, um, what were they in?' moments.

Episode 2 this evening.

More BBC Passion Links

Good summary of resource links over at Evangelism UK, who have a good poster, and a reminder to get involved in the message boards debating the events and meaning of easter. Roughly the same list of links is also at Dave Walkers new blog.

Full showtimes are now on the BBC site. Episode 4, the final one, will be shown at 7.30pm on Easter Sunday. The other 3 will be repeated in an omnibus from 2.15pm on the Sunday. When I know the number of the omnibus, and where it's going, I'll let you know.

Finally Mark Goodacre, who acted as theological consultant on the series, also has a blog where he reflects on his involvement, and the way the series is being recieved by the media. If you're looking for a blog where the person writing actually knows what they're talking about (as opposed to mine!) then it's worth keeping up with Mark's during the next 8 days.

BBC Passion video clips

This clip from the BBC passion is on Youtube, and the trailer is at the top of the series website. Looks good. Might be worth showing one of these, if you've got the facilities, next Sunday morning at your church to alert people to the series.

Update: the video above has been pulled from Youtube, but the Passion trailer is now on it:

More Passion Links

The Churches Media Council has a good section on the Passion production by the BBC, with a good quality printable leaflet.

ReJesus is gearing up for the series as well, with an evolving section of links, resources for all ages, prayers, readings, etc.

The BBC final schedules for Easter week are online, and there are some other interesting programmes planned, including a mystery play in an Manchester inner city estate, and several other religious themed programmes.

Update: the CMC site has posted the programme times: with a synopsis of each episode.
Palm Sunday 8pm
Monday 17th March 8,30pm
Good Friday 9pm
Easter Sunday, time TBC

Easter Resources, Heated Debates, and other links.

Dave Walkers blog has a new home: the Church Times have snapped him up. I wonder what he'll do if St. Stephen the Great Charitable Trust buy out the Church Times? (sorry, in-joke for readers of Dave's blog). He now (a little confusingly) has two main blogs, as well as the justifiably famous Dullest Blog in the World.

The UN are calling for the disestablishment of the Church of England. Pardon my French, but what the Hades has it got to do with them? The first comment pretty much says it all.

Worship Changes Lives is a new booklet from the CofE on, would you believe it, worship. It's 48 pages long, and sounds like it's more of a practical 'how to' volume than a theological tome. It's all part of Transforming Worship, an Anglican resource hub which I must admit I've not looked at very much so far, and really should explore some more. From the blurb it sounds very good, I may have to get a copy.

If you want a good argument and don't fancy the Resurrection debate (see yesterdays post), then you could always have a go at the Passion forums, relating to the Beebs new Passion production for Easter week.

CMS have a free Easter resource which you can download here. It's 60 pages, with ideas for workshops and pre- and post- Easter assemblies. There's also several photos with re-enactments of scenes from holy week involving children: a novel approach and quite powerful.

On the subject of Easter ideas, Barnabas in Churches is often my first point of call, and once again they have a good seasonal section.

BBC The Passion website has gone live

The new website for the BBC drama The Passion is here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/programmes/thepassion/

It looks very good - lots of video clips, articles with background to the story, brief episode guides etc. The Passion is due to air in Holy Week and looks like the Beebs flagship offering during that time.

Passion story on the BBC

The Beeb has added various sections to its background on The Passion, a drama produced for Holy Week this year, including interviews with the director, consultants, and actors with key roles. Here's a snippet:

David Oyelowo admits his deeply-held, personal faith made him wary of accepting the pivotal role of Joseph of Arimathea in The Passion.

"Of all the projects I've ever done it was the one I had to think hardest about as a Christian," says the actor.

David's biggest concern was that the production would present a sanitised or safe version of the story of Jesus's final days on earth.

"When I heard it was the BBC and HBO I wondered – is it going to be the PC, watered down, keep everyone happy version or are we going to genuinely tell the story as in the Bible which is more interesting to me?" he says.

His fears were allayed the moment he read the script.

"I read the script with a slightly sceptical eye and to my delight I recognised it as the story and events that have shaped my life for the last 15 years," he says.

"I was also elated that the BBC has the balls in this day and age, in this climate of religious sensitivity, to put on what may be deemed a controversial drama like this. For me it is one of if not the greatest stories of all time."

A dedicated website goes live tomorrow at bbc.co.uk/thepassion
HT Evangelism UK