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.)

Behind the Elstree wire

Are there any lefties in the latest complement of contestants in the Big Brother household? I have to ask here because for the first time since the programme began nine series ago my friends at Channel 4 and the production company Endemol have failed to fill me in with the latest news and gossip.

The usual whispered briefings, the gleeful confidences, conducted under conditions of strictest secrecy (the beer garden not the bar, the moving tube train not the station), have been absent this year. So I don’t know whether Mario (real name Shaun, by the way) is actually, like the lovely Carole Vincent last year, an undercover SWP activist who is itching to use the Big Brother garden ‘prison’ to draw attention to the government’s 42-day detention plans. Or if Mohamed Mohamed (it’s the way he spells ’em) is going to don a smuggled cat suit at the appropriate moment and milk the opportunity to garner support for George Galloway and his Bethnal Green and (bits of) Birmingham Respect (Renewal) party.

In past years not even my absence on a Maasai encampment has managed to stop my informants tracking me down to give me advance notice of the latest developments behind the Elstree wire. So this year’s silence may not last. There are murmurings, however, that the golden Big Brother goose is ailing. Opening-night viewing figures of 5.4 million (6.2 million last year) are still way above your standard minor-channel fare. But the demographic is telling. Eight years ago, the archetypal Big Brother audience consisted of a 25-year-old media studies graduate with lots of mates named Sophie, and a sprinkling of I-can’t-believe-I’m-30 sales and advertising johnnies named, erm, Johnny thrown in for good measure. Now it’s that 14-year-old girl with lots of mates named Lauren who lives in the flats opposite, and her cousin Daniel. Do they really have enough money to keep the advertisers happy? And have they even heard of Carole Vincent?