Tom Hollander made us laugh at the hypocrisy of religion, but also showed us human kindness
Of all the Christmas TV specials on repeat or catchup, the one I find most poignant, and funniest, is that episode of Rev in which Tom Hollander spectacularly fails to conjure some authentic spiritual feeling in his drunken congregation at midnight mass. The beauty of that series was that even in comically eviscerating the pieties and hypocrisies of the Church of England, Hollander never gave up on its potential for delivering simple human kindness.
When that episode came out, a decade ago, the census figures showed that 59.3% of the UK population still thought of itself as Christian. The latest census figures, released last week, have seen that number dwindle to marginally over half of the country – 51%. Meanwhile, the proportion of those who profess “no religion” has risen six percentage points to 38.4%. As someone who ticks that latter box, the only time I’m ever at a church service these days, beyond weddings and funerals, is for an annual nine lessons and carols. This year, as always, I was fascinated by how readily my memory inhabited even the more obscure of those sung verses. “Veiled in flesh the Godhead see/Hail the incarnate deity,” I sang, with all the other once-a-year attenders. And as ever, I sensed a flash of nostalgia for those childhood certainties – attributable, no doubt, to Charles Wesley and his peerless gift for rhyming propaganda.
