Television
Characters whose names seem drawn from a morality tale congregate round St Paul's Cathedral. Once there was a spry Christopher Wren and his chief plasterer, the excellent Henry Doogood, and now the trio of clerics featured in the first episode of a new observational documentary, St Paul's (BBC2, Sundays). The Dean, John Moses, is a temporising lawgiver, while a rubicund priest opposed to female ordination and poring over canon law is called John Halliburton, splendidly suggesting his jowly wobble. As for the cathedral's first female canon, she is called Lucy Winkett and is a snug fit for her neat and twinkling name.
Winkett beams towards heroine status as we follow her pebbly path to acceptance at the cathedral. Television's severe morality runs rings round the lax New Testament: it judges harshly those who don't play well to camera, and the cathedral establishment, perhaps unfairly, appear a Trollopian gaggle. The dean's soapy jovialities contrast cruelly with Lucy Winkett, who may be the loveliest person to appear on TV. She sings "Ain't Misbehavin'" (bad but lusty) and chants the service (edgy but ethereal). She smiles politely and raises merry eyebrows at chuntering colleagues. Old ladies and little girls hug her, and she distributes communion wafers saying "The body of Christ" in the sweetest explanatory voice.
Winkett knows that devouring documentary audiences don't want reserve, but private passions shared with the camera. As well as singing and smiling, she weeps when cathedral servers refuse to accept communion from her. It is at this ritual that modernising fudge meets uncompromising principle and prejudice over the sanctity of female priests, causing a fuss when Winkett's opponents refuse to use what they consider her unconsecrated wafers. They don't appear on camera to explain their beliefs - spin, baby, because we go with Lucy and her former East London parishioners, like the woman who argues: "If they look down on women, they look down on everybody."
Opening the series, the narrator explains that "The new dean must embrace tradition and bring the institution into the 21st century". Although a mantra that might recur in any institutional documentary, signifying no more than a new approach to funding opera or marketing a department store, at St Paul's the conundrum has some resonance. The cathedral, like the anxious Church of England itself, has the vaguest ideas about its future role. Tradition it can do in armfuls: a retired typesetter called Mrs Jolly has won the cathedral's competition to write a millennium hymn, and her words ("Through the darkness of the ages/through the sorrow of the days") might have been written at any time in the past 200 years.
St Paul's rose from the flames of the Great Fire of London in 1666, its motto "Resurgam" accompanied by a phoenix. As a symbol of London pride it will no doubt survive, if not as a thriving church (the congregation looks alarmingly skimpy on film). Meanwhile, we meet John Mustion, leading the maintenance team who patch, scour and sweep the cathedral's chequered floors and curlicued brass. Mustion, after 40 years' experience, has developed an explanation for the ever-renewed fluff in the crevices, blaming it on static created by nylon knickers. Upstairs he dusts madonnas and spruces the statuary (we catch a lovely glimpse of him perched behind the Duke of Wellington, apparently blowing the victor of Waterloo's nose); elsewhere, the boys in the backroom have other icons of devotion, with startling pinups of Pirelli girls and Margaret Thatcher. Who said there was no place for women in the C of E?
There had been less modest locker-room lovelies in Time- watch: Letting the Genie Out of the Bottle (BBC2, Saturday), which travelled to 1969, when the Danish parliament legalised pornography. "This was a period of very few worries," recalled writer Bente Hansen. "Everything was going up and up all the time." Yes, indeed, and in Denmark and Sweden economic prosperity and sexual freedom went hand in pocket. During the 1950s and 1960s, Swedish lads, "the pick-up boys", cruised round in self-advertising American cars, while Hansen remembered female sexual freedom: "Here in Denmark we said 'passport, money, diaphragm'." Sex education joined the Swedish curriculum, homosexuality, adultery and even bestiality were on the statute books, while a nudie photographer reported that proud mothers sent their daughters' snaps to his magazine.
Why did pride turn to shame? A pastor sniffed that the campaigners thought that people should be "free to live out their lusts". After sequences from early Scandinavian naturist films hymning the tang of fresh air and bared limbs, the programme charted an Eden despoiled. Once porn became legal, it became, to its supporters' chagrin, nastier. Innocent desire tarnished, lusts became crueller in the bang-for-buck marketplace. Freighted by a studiedly unexcitable narration by Andrew Sachs, Timewatch could have used more analysis and explored whether pornography could ever be "innocent", or whether it would always surrender to its dark side. As it was, the heir to a Swedish porn empire wincingly recalled growing up in a house full of phallic candlesticks and ashtrays shaped like vaginas. He had, however, become reconciled to his engorged money-spinner because, he said, "you meet lots of interesting people".
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