Monthly column on the arts

I flew with my wife last month to Pau, in southern France, for a week's break. We paid RyanAir the princely sum of a tenner each for the privilege, plus a little something for the airport tax authorities.

A friend who'd just spent ten pounds booking a flight to Sardinia put me on to this remarkable Internet deal.

It was a wonderful week, spent at the home of good friends. It included a bracing stroll above the snowline in the Basse Pyrenees, a wander round a French market, and an outing to Lourdes - where I found myself surprisingly moved (at least in the artistic sense) by the rather chaste simplicity of at least two of the three churches on the historic site.

Having seen St. Peter's in Rome, where every pope there ever was seems to have fancied his architectural chances, with disastrous results, I was expecting the worst and was pleasantly disappointed. We saw Lourdes in an afternoon of driving rain, with water running down the endless stone steps in torrents, and almost had the place to ourselves - my impressions of the place might have been rather different had we gone during one of the official pilgrimages, when the 600 or so shops (shuttered when we visited), plying their trade in holy-water bottles and assorted images, would have been open.

I must admit, the Grotto of Bernadette and the trappings of Mariolatry did nothing for me. But aesthetically at least I took away a lasting memory of a glorious church crypt, wrapped in a shadowed subterranean stillness and dominated by a single vibrant explosion of baroque gold above the altar.

Soap opera

We spent some of our time in Pau pursuing the memory of Dornford Yates, a hugely successful British novelist who built a house nearby in the 1930s and wrote about it in a best-selling novel, 'The House that Berry Built'. By dint of detective work, some help from the Internet and the sharp eyes of our hostess Hannah, we finally located the house, on the road up to the mountains just out of Eaux Bonnes. I've known Yates's novels since my schooldays and it was quite something to see the house.

Yates himself was by all accounts an unpleasant man; his exploits in Pau are still remembered, like a soap opera of the thirties. A man who struck up a friendship with Yates's wife was horsewhipped by the novelist on the steps of the English Club in Pau so viciously, it's said, that his arm was broken in the attack.

Human integrity

Soap operas were very much in the news when we returned to Britain. In Coronation Street the long saga of serial killer Richard Hillman was finally coming to a cliff-hanging conclusion; and its early-evening rival Crossroads had received the death sentence for the second time in its history, less than three months after its much-publicised re-launch.

Even in the old days Crossroads was a joke, with famously creaky scenery and even creakier acting. The new version promised really good scenery and a naughty camp spin to the plot. The first week saw liberal helpings of death, avarice, sex, scanty clothing and homosexual angst, and that was just the beginning.

How parents explained to young kids what it was that this 5.00pm drama was all about is a mystery; there can't have been many times on British TV when as soon as Blue Peter finished on one channel we were watching the tortured love of a young gay chef and his middle-aged lover on another, with adulterous suggestive bedroom scenes provided for those of the heterosexual persuasion. There were some major names in British TV drama involved in the briefly-revived Crossroads, and I hope they are duly ashamed of themselves. If you think my knowledge of the storylines betrays an unhealthy interest in early-evening pulp fiction, I can assure you that I watched very few episodes.

The Street

Coronation Street, by contrast, explored its sad story of greed and passion with a thoroughly human integrity, exploring, for example, the readiness of communities to hate public enemies without always asking too hard whether they are guilty or not. The murderer's motives were complex, and viewers were encouraged to understand him while never being asked to condone his crimes. Where Crossroads gave us cardboard caricatures, Coronation Street showed us that life is never simple; a useful lesson for anybody, rooted in a real understanding of fallen humanity - albeit one that rarely understands from what we have fallen.

I urge Christians to invest a little time in watching 'Corrie', especially those involved pastorally with people who are not Christians. It's an excellent exploration of 21st-century secular thinking, and makes some points it would be difficult to find made elsewhere. There are better ways of understanding those with whom we disagree than horsewhipping them on the steps of clubs.

Taking French leave and scrubbing a soap

Soap opera

Human integrity

The Street

David Porter

Main Articles

Other articles