Early Sunday Morning

I never have any difficulty waking early. This is a great advantage on Sunday when I can catch the ghetto slot reserved for religious broadcasting by the BBC.

As Roger Bolton, the doyen of British religious broadcasting points out, religious broadcasting is a weak relation within the BBC family. All the political staff are concentrated in London - because Parliament, the Queen, the Prime Minister and most political functions, such as major government departments, are in London. All the economic staff are in London. Obviously - the Stock Exchange and a huge number of major company HQs are in London. Well, the Archbishop of Canterbury is in London - at Lambeth Palace. Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor is in London. The Chief Rabbi is in London. The Methodist HQ is in London. The Muslim Council of Great Britain is in London. And where is BBC Religious Broadcasting based? Er, in Manchester, 250 miles to the north. I love Manchester. It is a vibrant city with a terrific cultural scene, entertainment and shopping galore, a Chinatown, an interesting ethnic mix of restaurants, and an active religious life. It deserves its unofficial title of the "Capital of the North". But it ain't London. Despite the huge BBC HQ on Oxford Road in Manchester, there is an inevitable perception that any department based there is of secondary importance.

In the same spirit, the main religious programs on Radio 4 get shoved into Sunday morning between 600am and 9am when much of the population are enjoying a lie-in or sleeping off the excesses of Friday and Saturday nights. But they don't know what they are missing. After the news headlines at 600am, you can enjoy "Something understood" a long established quasi-religious program which has a different theme each week. To quote its nebulous mission statement: "Each week the programme examines some of the larger questions of life, taking a spiritual theme and exploring it through music, prose and poetry."

Issues covered have included The Past, Desires, Happiness and Motherhood. The mood is typically reflective and thoughtful rather than specifically spiritual, but it provides an obvious platform for religious perspectives on that week's topic. And it always introduces me to new poetry, music and songs which I would never have encountered otherwise. Under the long time authorship of Mark Tully, the BBC's veteran India correspondent and resident in India, it is a peculiar and fascinating corner of the broadcasting week. It is repeated later on Sunday if you could not wake up on Sunday morning. You can enjoy it from 1130 to 1155pm, when its relaxed pace fits equally well into an end-of-the-day mood.

Then at 635am you have the Farming program. Well, that's logical. Only farmers and religious nutcases are awake at that ungodly hour. And the broadcasts from different parts of the British countryside often complement the atmosphere of "Something understood". Part of the appeal of radio is that the listener's imagination has to supplement the journalist's description of the beautiful piece of countryside where he is walking with the farmer. You can't help feeling that farmers are that bit closer to God, being intimately surrounded by His creation, so a secular farming program is less of an intrusion into the God Slot than the usual depressing news headlines.

At 700am you have another set of news headlines, followed by "Sunday", Roger Bolton's stamping ground. This is a general magazine news program, covering 5 or 6 topics from the week's religious happenings, in the UK and elsewhere. It is invariably interesting, but I occasionally find myself irritated at the superficiality of treatment of some topics. It is not Roger's fault in any way; you just cannot do justice to the vast majority of serious topics, secular or sacred, in five or ten minute slots.

800am brings a longer news broadcast, followed by "Morning Worship" at 810. This is usually a very straightforward broadcast of a Christian service from some part of Britain. To fulfill their remit as the British Broadcasting Corporation, they visit all parts of the UK over the course of the year. But even religious broadcasters can't resist the lure of a free foreign trip, if the budget can stand it. So you get occasional treats from any part of the world, such as a recent Mass from "St Paul's outside the Walls" in Rome. Obviously all concerned have been rehearsed exhaustively and the programs are planned and produced by meticulous professionals.Certain aspects, such as the copyright of broadcasted hymns, need extra attention which an ordinary parish service would never require. But the vast majority of participants are ordinary clergy, choir members and congregations, not broadcasting professionals. By 800am I am on my way to Mass and hear part of this program in the car. Again, I have heard any number of inspiring new hymns on these services.

Then you have the news again at 900am and the Radio 4 programming changes gear back to secular material, with the regular review of the week's media action. And so it goes on all day. And all the rest of the week. Religious material intrudes for short periods each day, with a "Thought for the day" for a few minutes each morning in the middle of the rolling news program. There is the "Daily Worship" in the middle of each morning for 15 minutes or so - when a large majority of the population are at work or school. But that program enjoys the record as the longest running radio program in the world, having been going continuously since 1926.

It would be unfair to pick on Radio 4, as they deliver more religious broadcasting than most other radio stations put together. And it provides a visible religious presence outside the small number of specifically religious radio stations and TV channels.These services, whether at home or abroad, are hugely appreciated by the sick and housebound.

We had a taste of this in January 1993 when an independent TV company broadcast a Mass from St James on one of the commercial TV channels. We received appreciative letters from all over the country, including a delightful elderly Polish lady who wrote an ecstatic message to our parish priest addressing him by all his titles. The Mass was broadcast live, so our parish priest, organist and choir were really performing without a safety net - unlike BBC religious broadcasts, which are prerecorded and edited to ensure maximum quality. Not surprisingly, we had seven full scale rehearsals to get ready and were all sick to death of the hymns well before broadcasting day. I had two video recorders running at home to tape the service and when I played it back it was a relief to see that none of the blunders were ours. The flaws were all technical: a bad camera wobble during the first reading, the camera in the centre aisle moving into the frame as it tracked towards the altar and a brief interruption when the uplink to the satellite failed for a minute or so. All of this would of course been removed by the editors if it had been a BBC gig.

The most obvious gaffe of all was the final hymn. The Mass was timed to fill the 1100am-midday slot on ITV. But we finished a few minutes early. We sung " I am the Bread of Life" as the final hymn. As we reached the last line: "I will raise him up on the last daaaay..." and our organist played the long final chord, the floor manager frantically signalled "Keep going! Keep going!" The organist restarted the hymn immediately, with hardly a beat's break, and we sung the whole hymn through twice more to pad out the time until after midday. The camera tracked pointlessly up and down the centre aisle; there was nothing else to focus on because Mass was over and the altar was empty. We singers were definitely running out of breath by the time it finished. It was such a contrast to the BBC's religious broadcasts where the sound and camerawork are immaculate.

Also we had a very lucky break as regards outside noise. For years Concorde would fly over Reading at 1130am and 600pm every day en route to New York. The sound was unmistakable and overwhelming, well before you looked up and saw that unique shape. The long penetrating crescendo, followed by its even more reverberant rumbling as it moved away, stopped all conversation on the ground for at least 30 seconds. Concorde was a very old design and its noise was far worse than any modern airliner. The broadcasters and planning team agreed that we would simply have to stop the service in its tracks if Concorde flew over; the noise, even inside St James' stone walls, would swamp the soundtrack. Yet it did not appear during the service and we had a clean soundtrack.

Does religious programming make any difference to most of the population? It is impossible to tell. As I said in an earlier email, modern viewers and listeners are swamped by the choice of channels. Audiences are subdivided into ever thinner slices. If you wanted a dedicated Catholic TV channel, you can find EWTN on SKY satellite or cable - selection 680...... I know at least a few of my fellow parishioners who seek out and love EWTN. So much of modern British life is so brutally secular that any religious presence in the media is an invaluable gift. When I went to a talk by Roger Bolton, he was very anxious that religious programming survive on a mainstream channel and not be pushed out completely into an electronic ghetto of Christian stations speaking only to the converted. Long may the God Slot enrich Sunday morning.