Eastenders
Happy birthday, Eastenders: 21 this week. And while we might raise a high-brow eye-brow at the idea of celebrating the birth of a 'soap', we also have to admit that the genre plays a significant role in popular culture today - for good or bad.
At a time when 85 per cent of us gain our primary knowledge about the world from television, we have to take seriously the part that fictional drama plays in shaping our view of reality. Lord Reith's vision for the BBC was to inform, educate and entertain - but drama will inevitably seek first to entertain.
This certainly happens with the portrayal of religion and Christianity on Eastenders. While its characters troop obediently to church for the regular hatches, matches and dispatches which punctuate the cycle of life in Albert Square, the only serious 'Christian' on the programme is Dot Cotton, the chain-smoking gossip who spits judgmental Bible verses like an AK-47.
And if this constitutes someone's only 'vision' of religion then it's no wonder they don't think too highly of Christians. To be fair, Dot's faith helps to inform her own moral decision-making - most movingly in a story-line about euthanasia involving her best friend Ethel - but it seldom seems to transform her life into the purposeful journey that so many Christians, young and old, experience and demonstrate with grace.
That said, while the portrayal of overt 'religion' is frustratingly narrow and stereotypical, many of the plot-lines nevertheless comprise moral explorations of issues facing 'everyday' people. They can summon both the spirit of the Blitz and the Bible, through characters who struggle in the face of hardship to overcome evil with good.
Of course, we all need a 'story' to live by or through, and that's why it's easy to get sucked into a soap without thinking. But there comes a point when we have to turn the virtual world of television off and switch ourselves on to life; whether it's our own, which Jesus said he came to bring us 'to the full' - or the lives of 'everyday' children in Africa, for example, 30,000 of whom are written out of the script daily.
The challenge, surely, is to create our own real-life drama through what we do and who we are; to be compelling characters in the greatest story ever told. And to Cotton on, if you will pardon the pun, to life in Christ.
Brian Draper
Comments
There are currently no comments for this article.
