It's a miracle that ITV's drama-docs tell gospel truth

What we need to ask of the well told stories that move us.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A doctor in blue scrubs stands looking exhausted.

Joanne Froggatt playing Dr Rachel Clarke.

ITV Studios/ITV.

ITV has reopened a debate over the value and validity of drama-documentaries, with two immensely powerful political serials. Breathtaking, set in hospital wards as the covid crisis hit the UK, concluded last week. Before that, Mr Bates vs. the Post Office did more for justice in a few hours for wrongly accused sub-postmasters, sacked and imprisoned for frauds that didn’t exist, than any number of leaden public inquiries stretching into a cynically can-kicking future.

A regular refrain from doubters of drama-doc is to question whether events portrayed really happened. At the most extreme end of denial, invariably motivated by political self-interest, if a scene can be shown to be non-factual, then the whole thing can be dismissed as rubbish.

I’m here to knock down that argument, not least because it has the most profound implications for people of faith and how they own their sacred scriptures.

Truth is not only about events, but about love and hope and self-sacrifice and much else besides.

Take Breathtaking, based on the book of the experiences of front-line doctor (and breathtakingly good writer) Rachel Clarke. There were more than a couple of scenes that I thought wouldn’t, indeed couldn’t, have happened in a factual reality. I can’t know, because I wasn’t there. But, importantly, I don’t care either, for reasons I’ll come to.

These scenes related to the death from covid, contracted on duty as a consequence of inadequate PPE equipment, of a much-loved fellow nurse called Divina. A colleague reads cards from friends to her as she switches off the life-support machines, while our heroine consultant bears tearful witness. Later, all her colleagues gather, socially distanced, to watch a livestream of her funeral.

If these events happened in real time, then I apologise profusely to Clarke and her team. But my guess – and this makes the drama even more heartbreaking rather than less – is that they simply wouldn’t have had the time. As with soldiers in a war zone, which is the regular analogy of choice, they were overrun by critical cases for whom survival was the imperative. They surely would not have had the bandwidth, as it were, to bury their dead.

Why this doesn’t matter, indeed why it is vital that it doesn’t, is that drama addresses human emotions as well as human experiences. So it’s at least as important to express how it felt as to show exactly what happened. This isn’t manipulative, because truth is not only about events, but about love and hope and self-sacrifice and much else besides, all of which point to bigger truths about the human condition.

Those somethings are miracles. So, ask not: Did it happen? Ask instead: What has happened?

Not so long ago, you couldn’t bump into anyone from the digital marketing professions without them mooing on about “storytelling”, the idea that corporates and their brands need to frame their offers to market in an engaging narrative.

I’ve always thought they were rather late to that party. So stories are important? Who knew? Similarly, journalists – or reporters at least – speak of their products as stories. And the good ones tell us something we don’t already know. But the effort here (or at least it should be) is to relate what is provably, factually true.

This is rather different from the motivation of those of us with a religious faith, for whom Truth with a capital T points to something that transcends the demands of simple reportage. Yes, it’s about an emotional response, but emotions are human too. They’re also insufficient on their own for full engagement with the divine drama.

The mystery of this drama is played out at church on at least a weekly basis in the Eucharist, when Christians come together in communion, as the mystical body of Christ and as if invited to his supper for the very first time. It’s not just an event or a re-enactment, it’s the drama of now and of the real presence (call it the real thing).

Mystery is what the scriptures of the three Abrahamic faiths endeavour to address. For Christians, the life death and resurrection of the Christ; for Jews, the deliverance of God’s people and, for Muslims, the revelation of the Prophet. These are not just historical records, they are stories that explore the mind of God, the better to understand human existence.

That’s to explore the miraculous, to allow room for miracles in human existence. At Easter, Christians will celebrate what we might call the big one: The resurrection of the Christ and the defeat of death. So, to that obvious question: What really happened?

Well, something happened. Something so incalculably enormous that, within three days of the crucifixion, the utterly defeated and dispersed first disciples were transformed. Something so incomprehensible that they struggled to explain it with the language of simple reportage, though they tried. Something for which untold thousands were suddenly prepared to die. Something which was apparently defeated by worldly power, but is alive and well as the world’s largest religion two millennia later.

Those somethings are miracles. So, ask not: Did it happen? Ask instead: What has happened? And the story is not only about what has happened, it’s really about how, emotionally and spiritually, we feel and respond to it.

In short, we’re asked to give ourselves up to this drama-documentary. It’s breathtaking.

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War & peace

1 November 2024

5 min read

Put poppy politics in the past and give Remembrance a hopeful future

Memory without hope will lead us to a dead-end.

Mark Gilbert

Mark is a research mathematician who writes on ethics, human identity and the nature of intelligence.

A woman walls along a war memorial wall covered in red poppies.

War memorial in Canberra.

Raelle Gann-Owens on Unsplash.

Remembrance Day is complicated. A nation shows its gratitude for the service and sacrifice of its armed forces and tries to connect to its history. Never far away, are poppy politics, along with anxiety about identity and forgetting, and fears about nationalism and militarism. Is this the way to remember?

Last November, protests in solidarity with Gaza dominated the headlines. On Armistice Day, hundreds of thousands of people marched through central London to demand a ceasefire. In the preceding weeks, there was vigorous debate about whether the march should be cancelled. There were several motivations for this: there were genuine fears of violence and extremism, and of disruption at the Cenotaph, but also questions of whether marching on Armistice Day was inappropriate or disrespectful.

The march itself was organised to minimise the risk of disrupting public commemorations of Remembrance. It started several hours after the two-minute silence and followed a route several miles from the cenotaph. It was mostly peaceful, although there were arrests for anti-Semitism, open support for terrorism and violent attacks on police officers. Armistice Day did see violence around the cenotaph, but this was from the self-described ‘Cenotaph Defenders’ who had organised a counter-demonstration against the Gaza march. The group of football hooligans and far-right EDL members gathered with poppy emblazoned banners declaring ‘Have some respect for British Heroes’. Within a few hours, the calls for respect had degenerated into violent attacks on serving uniformed officers, in this case the police.

The far-right’s adoption of remembrance symbolism can be seen as an extreme form of a wider entanglement of poppies and politics. The red paper poppy is a symbol of remembrance, but it has other connotations. For some it invokes patriotism and feelings of pride in their country, for others it represents conformity and militarism. Whether television news presenters are wearing them attracts disproportionate attention. In 2019, one Australian TV network had a very tasteless segment denouncing a rival station whose newscasters failed to wear poppies. The non-poppy wearing hosts were accused of failing in their duty to respect their country and to help preserve its culture and traditions. Regardless of the presenters’ actual reasons, this feels like a lot of baggage to load onto the delicate poppy, a symbol of quiet remembrance and gratitude.

Unsurprisingly, this has led many to question whether Remembrance Day has become detached from its original purposes. Twelve years after the death of the last British First World War veteran, there is little living connection to either of the two world wars. With this passage of time, there is a growing danger of mistaking the symbols of ceremonial Remembrance for the thing itself.

The focus of remembrance can shift away from the sheer horrors of war, from awe at the sacrifice of our forebears, and from the resolved ‘never again’ to fixing our gaze on the processed goods: the ceremonial silence, the poppies themselves and even the quality of our own emotional response.

Some commentators have suggested that organised Remembrance has served its purpose and is best forgotten, and that too much remembering is a bad thing, fuelling grudges and sectarian conflicts. Personally, I’m not convinced, but I do think our current Remembrance is missing something.

With a strong grounding in a shared past and a common hope, we would talk frankly about the times our country has fallen short without a sense of betraying our history or identity.

Reflecting on the importance and difficulty of memory, the writer and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel emphasised the importance of hope. Despite the horrific experiences of the twentieth century, for Wiesel it is hope that “summons the future”. Memory without hope would lead us to a dead-end, where we grip onto the past while feeling it slip like sand through our fingers. Many of the anxieties around Remembrance point to a hope deficit.

How can we remember with hope?

We need to broaden our perspective and engage better with our shared national story. We need to be grounded in our history, stories and myths but we also need to be drawn forward by the good things we have and will have. If this story is big enough then it will be a large tapestry of interwoven strands, and we will be able to generously incorporate new strands, other cultures with their own relationship to the past into it. We will also be better prepared for our remembering to deal with difficult questions about our nation’s history. With a strong grounding in a shared past and a common hope, we would talk frankly about the times our country has fallen short without a sense of betraying our history or identity. Hope would connect us better to our neighbours overseas and to the men and women who risk their lives to serve their country.

Last Remembrance Sunday, I helped our church’s under-7s make big paper poppies out of red paint and paper plates. The older children made origami peace cranes, and both the big red poppies and the peace cranes were placed by the altar. Here the focus is on remembering, but not just on our own memory. For me and countless other Christians, God’s memory is the real focus. God remembers us in our broken and war-torn world, and as Jesus, chose to join us in it, experiencing the worst of suffering while dying a painful death. All our personal and collective stories of pain, loss and sadness are met in this sacrifice. More than this, in the promises of restoration Jesus gave when He rose from the dead, they find a concrete hope.

What does Remembrance look like when it’s really grounded in hope? I think there would be a few noticeable signs. It would be less precious about itself. It would be more open to different emphases of remembrance such as the Peace Pledge Union and the white poppy, and excited about new creative expressions of remembrance like the ‘poppy walks’ organised by the Royal British Legion. More patient to the concerns of those who find the religious elements of Remembrance difficult. More integrated into our attitudes to current and ongoing conflict around the world. Most of all I hope it would make us really hungry for both peace and for righteousness.