大象传媒

From the Reverend Richard Coles:

Like half the country, and most of Radio Two, I was stricken with the Christmas lurgi. Occupational hazard for a clergyman, with Carol Services a more effective means for the transmission of disease than pre Victorian sanitation. And so it came to pass that, as the shepherds abided in the fields, I came down with a rasping cough, a throat like raw liver, and what felt like a hangover only with none of the enjoyment that its begetting might bring.

After duties were done, I took to my bed, with no dinner, a streaming nose and - upside - streaming video. So I watched Peaky Blinders and Game of Thrones, rightly recommended, and despite feeling my mortality keenly, perked up no end ticking off the things they got wrong. A wedding scene in Peaky Blinders with odd candles on the altar and peculiar vestments; 鈥淣EVER WEAR A STOLE OVER A CHASUBLE,鈥� I croaked at the television. Then, in Game Of Thrones, I noticed that in Santaland, or whatever it鈥檚 called, the Starks stride around their frozen castle, ice underfoot, without ever slipping. FAKE SNOW! I croaked, paraphrasing the Orange Lord of House Trump. Minor triumphs for a pedant like me, but there鈥檚 a major problem, and it鈥檚 to do with missing the big picture. 聽

These are not historical seminars, but historical dramas, shaped by the demands of the action, or the constraints of technology, rather than the current academic consensus on siege warfare. Look for bloopers and you may miss what is really revealed, by a brilliant script, and fantastic actors, and skilful direction - truths about who we are, and how the world is.

Tomorrow is the Feast of the Epiphany, actually the culmination of Christmas, when three figures on camels led by an astronomically impossible phenomenon arrive at the stable at Bethlehem with gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. Fake news? Out of a jumble of prophecy and history and theology and memory, a big picture is revealed. Hope, fulfilled, radiant in a manger, staggeringly insignificant, but with the power to change the world and us.