Losing My Religion
Death and the BBC.
The cruellest thing about nursing someone through their last months is witnessing death’s theft of joy. Afterwards others will blandly talk about an end to suffering, at least they’re not in pain anymore. True, death is the final escape from the bald humiliation of dying, but the relief cessation brings is not healing, is the opposite of healing, is the final failure to heal. Stripped of autonomy, strength, coherence, ease, those lucky enough to die late and with warning face the gradual shameful defeat of all that living means.
Before returning to die in our living room, my mum spent some time in a hospice. Too sick to live but unable yet to die, mainly she was terrified. However towards the end of her stay she was visited by a lay chaplin who instilled in her a calmness, an ease, which wavered but nevertheless aided her in facing her end. I do not know what he said or what she ultimately believed but though I have no faith, I have gratitude.
Religion can seem like a comfort blanket. What else is the eternal hereafter when imagined, as it so often is, as a more mundane mundanity. Robbed even of the threat of death, what would we do all day in paradise? Would we flock to hang out with Mary Shelly or Marc Nolan or Martin Luther King? Would we even bother to walk to the shop? Were there no time to waste, no problems to avoid, would anything be done? Could this greetings card afterlife be anything other than a still life, an unending moment sunk deep in a soft chair, a hell of eternal passivity?
To be fair, this concept of post-death as like life but solved, is irreligious, a caricature of traditions genuinely felt more as acceptance. Comfort, denial, is the idea of continuation, of you still alive but with wings and a peaceful smile. To describe the end of this life as a transition to something else is an unfinished attempt to comprehend the incomprehensible state of unbeing. It’s doubtful a butterfly has any real memory of being a caterpillar, or that caterpillars look at butterflies with anticipation. If there is a soul it is not part of us we would recognise if it fluttered past our heads.
My mum’s main religion was the BBC. She detested commercial TV to the point of banning it from the house until I was a teenager. I grew up in a 2 channel household, like some relic of the 1940s, some Anglo Amish. I think only the British Museum is older as a national institution bearing the name British. Plenty is Royal and the terms become synonyms in British Empire and British Army. For most Britons it surely was the BBC that first drew the soul of the nation into the home. Certainly, though she was not a patriotic woman, my mum’s ban expressed a disdainful sense that ITV was somehow unBritish. Not just full of American TV but TV made by and for people who wanted to be American, like her big sister who had moved there after the war and never returned. Or perhaps the ban was instead connected to the way she felt it was the advertising industry that had corrupted her little brother, had in some way fuelled the schism between them, a separation they both carried to the grave.
Reading Russell T Davies’ recent casual prediction of the BBC’s demise I thought of my mum, propped on pillows, watching the butterflies flit over the weeds in the garden. Claiming that partnering with Disney for the new series of Dr.Who was an obvious move to protect the future of the show, Davies sounded very much like a sorrowful friend saying how at least soon the patient would be free from pain. It’s true, now 102, the BBC certainly has entered the undignified stage of loss of faculty, of joy. If I think what I would mourn were today’s BBC to vanish, I’m left with little. On TV there are some reality contest shows I’m happy to sink into and I still feel happier with my kids glued to CBeebies than Netflix with its preference for 20 minute episodes. I start most mornings by listening to The Today programme but long past are the days when Radio 4 would be the constant quiet soundtrack to my own daily mundanity. Still an addict to radio, I now guiltily create my own schedule from a string of podcasts. Am I happy paying the license fee for this? Oh mum forgive me but I think I’m done.
If even I wouldn’t take to the streets to save the BBC, then Davies is doubtlessly correct. It’s worth noting though that the diminution of the national free-to-air broadcaster is not the inevitable deprivation of time. As humans our biological destiny is written into our genetics, but the cancer in the BBC was incubated deliberately as a policy choice. The same is true of our “national religion”, the NHS. The recent Kings Fund study found overall satisfaction with the service had dropped to 29%, the lowest level since the survey started in 1983. Listening to the BBC report this was to eavesdrop on two aging patients discussing bowel movements whilst waiting for the nurse to come. There are legitimate reasons for the NHS to be struggling in 2024, let us recite them, the aging population, the cost of new treatments once unimaginable, the global pandemic for which it had been rendered utterly unprepared. Again though the main reason why people are dissatisfied with the NHS is because it has been deliberately run into the ground for the benefit of those who see the vast profits that are possible in the US health system. A system for profit not people. For more than a decade now their hand has been tight on the breathing tube whilst they hungrily check their watch, eagerly suggesting it’s probably time to call it.
We will mourn both institutions and then find fresh mistakes to make. All caterpillars can do is mindlessly consume, only butterflies can fly.
My screenwriting course returns at the end of May in London and on zoom. Across 9 weeks I’ll demystify the telling of stories in pictures and teach you some simple but powerful tools which, instead of forcing your ideas into some genre template, will enable your stories to sound like you. You can book for this here.
Many of you already know this, many have already been on it, but if you know someone else who you think would enjoy it then send them my way…
Should you wish to try to before you buy, then I have a taster session coming up in London on the 9th of May and you can book for that here.
Though it does act as a soft introduction to the longer course it also has a stand-alone focus on the discovery of story ideas - what makes a good one and how to have more of them. The cost of this session is also deducted from the full course if you book both, so its sort of free…
I think you might appreciate Jacob Phillips' book, "Obedience is Freedom". Among other things he talks about nursing his mother, who was one of the Greenham Common women: "My mother would only accept help from me: she always resisted any external support or assistance. For most of a period of twenty years I was the only person she spoke with."
We God-botherers find those banal images of Heaven pretty uninspiring too. My wife has an especial loathing of the line "all in white shall wait around", from Once in Royal David's City - it sounds more like a hospital waiting room than the eternal contemplation of the face of God.