God on Trial

If you missed it last night, thank God for BBC iPlayer, on which you can watch it for the next seven days:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00dc2hn

Frank Cottrell Boyce’s God on Trial is BBC drama at its best. Based on the (probably apocryphal) story of how, in the face of the Nazis and the holocaust, a group of Auschwitz prisoners charged and tried God with breaking his covenant with the Jewish people, it made potent, prime-time (straight after the watershed) viewing. It’s doubtful whether any other broadcaster would have given it such a slot – and none, of course, would have shown it without advertising breaks, those destroyers of dramatic faith.

Cottrell Boyce’s previous work includes the screenplay to Welcome to Sarajevo, Hilary and Jackie and 24 Hour Party People, featuring Steve Coogan as Factory Records founder Tony Wilson – which is about as different from Auschwitz as you can get but one of my favourite British films of recent years. The cast of God on Trial includes Antony Sher, Rupert Graves and Jack Shepherd, and everyone else matches their high standards.

I’d have been a poor juror hearing the case against God in that Auschwitz blockhouse, my mind made up before hearing the arguments. To paraphrase one prisoner, either God is not all-powerful, or he would prevent this happening, or he is not just, for only then could he tolerate it. And what is the point of a God who is not both all-powerful and just?

But it is a tribute to both the writer and the actors that even I felt myself being swayed by the defence (something that didn’t happen to me, incidentally, in The Trial of Judas Iscariot, at the Almeida Theatre earlier this year, when the deistic sympathies of the author produced a wet and distant Jesus who had me rooting for a fucked-up Judas with all my heart and soul). Not least among these arguments was the view that since the Nazis had succeeded in stripping the prisoners of everything else, they should not permit them to strip them of their God as well.

I won’t tell you the prisoners’ verdict, but that’s not really the point of the play – you reach your own anyway. And whichever way you judge it, it’s a far easier call in the comfort of your living room than ever it was for those tortured souls in Auschwitz.

(Frank Cottrell Boyce is a Catholic. He writes about his faith and the making of God on Trial here - but note that he mentions the verdict in the first paragraph.)

To the gods I don't believe in

I’ve just spent a chunk of the weekend in the White Peak, running the Six Dales Circuit, followed by Remembrance Sunday hobbling my way around the Seventh Steppingley Step in Bedfordshire. That’s 51 miles in all, five years after a spinal injury left me wondering whether I’d be able ever to walk properly again, let alone run.

I’m not really supposed to do it. One of the consultants who saw me at University College Hospital in 2002 warned me off running and all contact sports on the grounds that a bad twist or fall could leave me paralysed below the waist. Another gave me just me enough encouragement to decide that the risk was worth taking. In any case, I know that if I wasn’t feeding my addictive qualities through physical exercise, I’d only be doing so in other, perhaps even riskier ways.

The first time I ran any distance again after the injury was around an island on Lake Bunyonyi, ‘the place of many little birds’, in the southwest Ugandan highlands. The sun was setting and a great storm was breaking with plump, clear rainplops splashing upturned umbrellas in the water.

Bunyonyi is that rare thing in east Africa: a guaranteed bilharzia-free expanse of fresh water. So a swim to finish off the run was irresistible, even as the electricity bristled in the air overhead.

I was treading water, inhaling deeply of an endorphin high and my amazingly good fortune in the successful completion of the 1.8 kilometre circuit of the island, when something broke the surface of the lake a foot or so in front of my face. It was gone as quickly as it appeared before showing itself again, dark, sleek and swift, first to one side and then to another. Finally, it re-emerged directly ahead of me, the distinct shape now of a small head, a mouth, whiskers and two eyes fixed firmly on mine, close enough to touch.

I caught glimpses of other shapes, shimmying through the water around me, the surface tension barely stirring as they slid in, out, down and around. A family of otters, fishing, playing in the water as dusk fell – and me, for those few brief moments, at one with them all.

It was a mini-epiphany, as near as I’ll ever get, I expect, to spiritual revelation – and the perfect accompaniment to the minor miracle of my physical recovery. I never finish a run these days without thinking a silent prayer of gratitude to the gods I don’t believe in. And I'm sure I saw an otter swimming alongside me briefly in the river Dove on Saturday.