The BBC gets a lot of stick. Sometimes justified, sometimes not.
Their football coverage is abysmal. Motson has lost the plot. Lineker is a smug twat. Reports also suggest that there are cancerous tumours with more personality than Alan Shearer. And whose punditry extendeds beyond "and then this happened. Then this happened"
BBC3 comedies are generally car crash telly at its worst, but at least they're trying to showcase new talent. Gavin and Stacey would testify to that.
On the hand, their new coverage is generally unequalled. I've never understood the constant praise for Channel 4 - while it may be in depth, as Jeremy Clarkson said to do the news on Channel 4 you just need to put on a paid of funny socks and read the Guardian out loud.
So, when they put on something worthy of the license fee on its own, they should get credit.
Last night BBC2 showed the feature length drama 'God on Trial'. Based on what is likely an apocrophl tale in Auschwitz, it tells the tale of a group of Jewish prisoners who decide to put God on Trial for the crime of breaking the covenant he was supposed to hold with them.
What follows is almost a play. More or less filmed in one setting, and featuring eloquent extended speeches as the characters mediate on the meaning of the covenant, their relationships with God – both personal and as a race, the meaning of free will and the writings of the Torah. Is this simply another test of their faith, or have they been abandoned?
The writing is first class, and the debate conjures images of the great discussions of Ancient Greece. The author wrote an article on it in the Guardian previously about how it challenged his own Catholicism, and is well worth a read here
In the end the prisoners declare that God is guilty of breaking their convenant with him. What shall we do now, one asks, shortly before ‘the selection’ among them are taken to the gas chambers. Let us pray, they respond.
