He’s Harold Miller, the Bishop of Down and Dromore in Northern Ireland, who, according to the BBC, claims there are no additional religious programmes, and those that are on will “do little to feed our souls”.
Miller says he would like to have seen more in-depth religious schedules running from Palm Sunday to Good Friday, but instead “pretty well nothing” has been on offer.
He pointed out that the morning service which was usually shown on Palm Sunday was “kicked off by the Formula One”.
Bishop Miller stressed that he “no longer expects anything of religious depth from ITV”[;] however[,] “the BBC, as our primary public broadcaster[,] really ought to find some way of recognising and painting the story of Good Friday.”
However, he praised the output of Radio Ulster as “almost perfection when it comes to religious broadcasting”.
Glad I don’t have to listen to Radio Ulster, then.
One has to ask the usual question, of course: why the hell should the millions of people who don’t give a monkey’s butt about religion have their usual programming shoved aside (probably wouldn’t make much difference to most viewers of television, for whom it’s just audible wallpaper, but the principle still holds)?
Why don’t the churches club together and run a digital TV station? Then they can have wall-to-wall wailing, chanting, preaching, hymn singing, genuflecting, wafer munching and talking to invisible people. And the rest of TV land can remain secular.
But the likes of Miller don’t want that. They want religion to be thrust on all of us, because they think it’s good for our souls.
