by Allison Pearson, Telegraph
While a new report paints a bleak picture for Britain’s vicars, the Church’s remote, arrogant hierarchy is focusing on slavery reparations
Here’s a Sunday brainteaser for you – how many fictional vicars can you think of? Top of many people’s list: the obsequious, simpering Mr Collins in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (immortalised by the brilliant actor David Bamber in the BBC’s 1995 adaptation). I am just about old enough to remember Derek Nimmo who made his name playing the sweetly hapless Rev Mervyn Noote in the 1960s BBC sitcom All Gas and Gaiters (Noote was the bumbling chaplain to the worldly Bishop Cleaver at St Ogg’s Cathedral). There was also Dick Emery’s buck-toothed vicar, who first appeared in The Dick Emery Show in 1963.
The 1982 BBC adaptation of Trollope’s first two Barchester novels featured two top vicars – Donald Pleasence as the sainted Septimus Harding and Alan Rickman, deliciously odious as the Rev Obadiah Slope (he gave Mr Collins stiff competition in the divine unctuousness stakes). The contrast between low clerical calculation and high-church morality has long been a rich seam of British satire.
Everyone remembers Rowan Atkinson’s nervous “Holy Goat… er, Ghost!” chaplain in Four Weddings and a Funeral, but it’s hard to beat his sketch for Not the Nine O’Clock News. Atkinson’s bitterly resentful vicar boils over in the pulpit, rebuking his congregation for their poor attendance. “The week before, Harvest Sunday, there were three of us. Myself, the organist, Mr Posner, and a tin of spaghetti. Where were you b——s then?”
Despite declining church numbers, clergymen (and women) continue to loom large on our screens. The cosy, chocolate-loving Geraldine Granger regularly outwitted her parish council in The Vicar of Dibley, which painted a charming portrait of a potty yet devoted community.
Read also: Letters to The Telegraph: Plummeting clergy numbers reflect a church that has lost its way