The_Spectator_April_15_2017

BOOKS & ARTS

Some gifts are easily

forgotten.

Yours will last

for generations.

St Peter,Winterbourne Stoke,Wiltshire

LEAVING A GIFT IN YOUR WILLtotheNationalChurchesTrustisn’tjustagift,it’saninvestment.Many

oftheUK’shistoricchurches,chapelsandmeetinghousesarefightingabattleagainsttheravagesoftime.

Weneedtomakesurethattheygettherepairsandrenovationstheyneedtoremainattheheartoflocal

communities.LeavingagiftinyourWillhelpsuskeepthesepreciousbuildingsaliveforfuturegenerations.

Find out how you can help keep the UK’s churches alive, please call Claire Walker on02072220605,

[email protected] visitnationalchurchestrust.org/legacy

National Churches Trust, 7 Tufton Street, London SW1P 3QB. Registered Charity Number:1119845

Television

Look back in anger

James Delingpole

‘What we really need is a faux-historical

drama series about police brutality and

black activism set in 1970s London,’ said

no TV viewer, ever. But TV commission-

ing editors have more important priorities,

these days, than mere plausibility, enter-

tainment or value-for-subscription fee. So

naturally, when the chance arose to make

Guerrilla (Sky Atlantic, Thursday) — a six-

parter about Black Panther-style revolu-

tionaries, starring Idris Elba and written by

the guy who did 12 Years a Slave — the sen-

ior luvvies at Sky were on it like a mistimed

high-five.

I like Idris Elba. And I’m not just say-

ing that because it’s actually now illegal not

to think he is our greatest living actor who

should definitely be the next James Bond

and also the lead in all the plays in the next

RSC season, from Hamlet to Lear (though

not Othello, obviously, because that would

how dramatic can you make a sequence of
scenes where there is no narrative thrust
other than the need to get the notes right
before the performance? Even when Lena,
Bach’s wife, suffers a miscarriage, and loses
so much blood her life is under threat, the
music comes first, and what we begin to
fear could develop into a terrible person-
al crisis is suddenly abandoned as a sto-
ryline. Lena (beautifully played by Melody

Grove) returns to rehearsals sounding OK,
without a further word about her state of
health. But Russell Beale makes us believe
he is Bach, and that we are back in 1727,
or rather that 1727 is the present, and the
composer is struggling in this very moment
to turn the notes he has written into a very
different telling of the Passion. Bach (or
rather Russell Beale) explains how this was
to be a new kind of oratorio and that listen-
ing to his music was to ‘become an act of
faith in itself’.
This was a perfect example of ‘slow radio’
(which is coming to Radio 3 next month in a
nine-hour special, so more on this later). To
appreciate it, you need the time and space to
listen slowly, not expecting to be moved by

the storyline but by the thoughts provoked

by what Bach has just said. ‘If we don’t con-

front our darkest fears they will haunt us till

we die.’

Over on 3, the Free Thinking festival

of talks and discussions, recorded over a

single weekend at the Sage in Gateshead,

always requires a lot of its listeners. You

can’t listen to a talk about the neuroscience

of sleep, or how to be calm in a fast-paced

world, while chopping onions. To miss a

word or two breaks the link and there’s no

way back to understanding what’s being

said. But My Body Clock Is Broken on

Wednesday evening (produced by Zahid

Warley) was worth sitting down for. Anne

McElvoy chaired (with her characteristi-

cally crisp intelligence) a discussion about

depression with a writer who has suffered

from manic depression, an expert on age-

ing, a historian of medicine and a consult-

ant who works with those who suffer from

chronic fatigue. There was such wisdom

here. How do we know when we’re about

to cross that line from being just about OK

to being very much not OK? Why routine,

those seemingly trivial habits, the ‘fragile

furnishings of the mind’, is so important

when treating patients with dementia. Why

narrative, now often underrated, is a valua-

ble technique in therapy, making sense of a

personal story, containing the distress while

How do we know when we’re about

to cross that line from being just about

OK to being very much not OK?

also providing a way of outlining and stat-

ing it. That’s something the Gospel writers

(and Bach) understood.