Smash hit

No subjects are off limits in Private Eye, but in the end there has to be at least a moral justification for what you are doing — quite how religious that is, is open to question. I certainly don’t believe in not speaking ill of the dead simply because they are dead: if you’ve been rude to people in life you have earned the right to carry on.

For Christmas 2004 we ran a cover showing the Breughel painting of the Nativity with one of the Wise Men saying to the shepherds: “Apparently the baby’s David Blunkett’s”, and we had a lot of complaints about blasphemy.

I don’t feel that faith precludes humour or vice versa, though it certainly isn’t stand-up comedy. But, when I was the age Jesus was when he died, I was one of six 33-year-olds asked to do a Lent talk for Radio 4 entitled Who Would You Have Been?, and I had an awful, immediate feeling that I would have been one of the smartarses at the foot of the Cross making bad jokes.

When Channel 4 asked me to do the Canterbury Tales series, it was clear what approach they wanted to take — it was a case of “Here’s some material to be amusingly sneery about,” and they thought I would be the person to do it. What turned out was very different: my opinion of the Church of England was not exactly changed but certainly reinforced by doing a 20th-century history of it, and I think the series is one of the best things I’ve done. It was full of terrific and illuminating stories of incredibly decent men: despite the ludicrousness, the class problems and the campery and all the things that are easy to laugh at in the Church of England, there remain these beacons of witness which telling that story made me appreciate.

I started the series with the Ton-Up Vicar, a sort of Sixties Father Brown: he had a leather jacket and a motorbike and was very keen on coffee. There is something of that about the Church of England: because it isn’t the Catholic Church, and it’s not saying: “We don’t move, we don’t change, we don’t engage,” it opens itself to that sort of mockery.

It’s also part of what we do in this country: the things we traditionally laugh at are the Bar, the Pulpit, the Throne, so, whatever our national Church, it would have been an object of fun. All the best jokes in Chaucer are about religious figures.

Of course there’s an element of having been born into Anglicanism, or having had it when you were younger, and feeling comfortable and therefore simply going on with it, but the Church of England is about the only Church I can imagine belonging to.

Another reason for belonging is the need to provide a structure for a felt morality: I feel I’m in a search for meaning and I don’t really want to give it up. I don’t want to say there isn’t any, or I’m going to construct one entirely away from the emotional appeal of the things that I think work, which include music and architecture and poetry, with which we’re pretty well endowed and which surround and inspire back.

I like traditional worship patterns and I love church music so, given the choice, Evensong is for me — although I still find Sunday evenings very difficult; at about 6.40 I can hear the metaphorical bell going and I think: “That’s it: now it’s time for chapel and that’s the end of the weekend.”

At moments of crisis I’ve met lots of good priests, a couple of whom were women, so I never had a problem with that. Like most Anglicans, I suspect, a brief experience was enough to make me think, “What was that fuss about?” As far as gay issues are concerned, I can’t believe the amount of time spent on this one subject: people must think that the Anglican Church is only interested in homosexuality. Whether it’s African bishops telling you about it in detail or American bishops talking about same-sex relationships, you would not know that there is any other agenda.

How can the Anglican Church be exercised about homosexuality and women when, for almost its entire history, it has been run by homosexuals and attended by women? Heterosexual males are a minority in the Anglican Church. I suppose I’m rather wet on those issues: rather like the debate over women priests and bishops, it may lead to a schism, it may not, but I feel it will end up having to be addressed. Betjeman’s biographer marvellously claimed that “he deliberately shackled himself to a dying Church”, but I don’t think the game’s up yet.

I love the quote from Robert Runcie with which I ended The Canterbury Tales: “The Church of England remains the focus of vague religious expectations on the part of the great majority of the English people” — I can’t help saying Amen to that.

Edited extract from Why I Am Still an Anglican, edited by Caroline Chartres (Continuum, £12.99). From TimesBooksFirst, 0870 1608080, www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst at £11.69 inc p&p