Endless carols; inebriated worshippers; health and safety nightmares… for the vicars who inspired TV’s ‘Rev’, the season of goodwill only goes so far.
Christmas is a time of grin and bear it. It’s something you have to get through.” A quote from Ebenezer Scrooge? The Grinch? Actually, they’re the season-weary words of the Reverend Andrew Wickens, rector of All Saints Church in Newton Heath, Manchester. Wickens is one of four clerical advisers to the hit BBC sitcom Rev, in which inner London priest Adam Smallbone (Tom Hollander) fights to hold on to his faith while beset by the apathy, rage or haplessness of his parishioners and peers. He’s dealt with various daunting challenges in the second series of the show – crises of conscience, interfaith football tournaments – but things come to a head in this week’s Christmas special. Run increasingly ragged by the competing demands of the pastoral and domestic hearth – carol recitals, familial visits, stuffing candles into oranges for the children’s Christingle service – he succumbs to a near-psychotic “episode” on the altar at the height of a drunken Midnight Mass.
“It’s absolutely the busiest and most stressful time for priests, and I felt I hadn’t seen that on telly,” says James Wood, Rev’s writer and co-creator. “They’re out every night, visiting the housebound, organising nativity plays, or burying the elderly who’ve been carried off by the cold weather. They’re also constantly fighting against secular commercialisation. One priest I know despises Christmas cards; she hates the exclusivity of them. She says she can’t think of anything less Christian than the annual ‘who’s in, who’s out’ list. It’s no wonder they get compassion fatigue.”
For Andrew Wickens, it’s important to at least give the impression of serenity throughout the Christmas season. “You have to be the swan, effortlessly swimming through still waters, while madly flapping underneath,” he says. This isn’t always easy. “We had our Christmas fayre last weekend,” he says, “and the day before, we discovered that all the vestments had disappeared. We’re in mid-restoration, and we had all the carpenters, electricians, and timber conservators turning the place upside down, trying to find the wretched things. We unearthed them eventually – someone had moved them without telling me.” And the fayre itself wasn’t without incident. “On Saturday morning, my warden told me that someone had dropped some leaves inside the church gate,” says Wickens. “I went to look, and it was an absolutely huge stash of cannabis. I had to nip over to the rectory and grab a Tesco carrier bag, and there I was, at 10am, in a dog collar, spooning this stuff into the bag, trying to maintain my equilibrium.”
The Reverend Philip North, rector of four London churches including St Michael’s in Camden, and another adviser to the show, draws on all his reserves of natural ebullience as the season gets under way. “Everyone needs a bit more radiance at Christmas, and you have to provide that,” he says. “As a priest, the one thing you can’t do is show weakness. People depend on you, especially in the inner city. You’ve got to be bright and breezy, and you can’t look tired or run down. And you certainly mustn’t snap at people, though it’s so tempting at times.” How does he deal with it? “You laugh at it,” he says. “I have a great team, and we settle back with our G&Ts and turn the niggles into wonderful stories.”
Much more at:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/topics/christmas/8958367/Why-all-Revs-dread-Christmas.html