Monthly column on hymns and songs

Did you see me on the telly last week? No, wait, it was five months ago, but (a) how time flies, and (b) this gets written so far ahead that it was last week. It depends where you count from.

Anyway, BBC Songs of Praise did a Sunday on Isaac Watts. Finding no one else, they went into the highways and byways, and enticed me into the studio (actually a well-known London library, but not the Evangelical one) to answer questions on the little giant who is my hymnwriting hero.

The next bit won't happen to you if you are never on the box, or if you appear every week. I get prime-time exposure on average once every 20 years; the last time was when our church nearly burned down. Soon after the broadcast finished, the phone calls started; next day, the letters. This was more fun than the programme; it was good to hear that I sounded sincere, looked smart and seemed relaxed - by way of contrast, I suppose, from usual. Some friends even noticed what the subject was, and one or two, that the Lord came into it and (we trust) was glorified by some of it.

Suspicious minds

Some of those kind enough to comment were almost to be expected; addicts of hymns, Songs of Praise, or both. Others were more of a discovery: the nine-year-old daughter of the gas-man attending to our son's new flat, for example. She recognised the face she had seen at his wedding. Tim said he would have treated the whole story with suspicion except that she reckoned the programme was about hymns; that lent some likelihood to the rumour. Or the teacher who told the children in assembly that they now had a celebrity with them; I tried to put that right. Or my organist sister who videoed it before she realised it was only me.

One response was startling. 'Why didn't you tell us?' they demanded indignantly at the church I attend three times a week. 'We could have watched it!' In vain I argued that they saw me regularly live, in the flesh; that they had heard me rabbitting on about Watts, Wesley and Dudley-Smith at some length. No, no; but if we saw you on the box (they seemed to be saying), then we'd know it's true, and that you were real!

In our admittedly strange world, isn't this odder even than usual? We won't believe it until we see it on telly. The TV clearly adds something magical, desirable, that real life doesn't have. I once had to sit through a programme about rural ministry 'because it is so relevant to us'. By some minor miracle it wasn't actually bad; but it showed nothing that my colleagues and I did not know already, or were doing every day of the week and four or five times on Sundays.

You will have noticed by now that this month's piece is hymn-related rather than hymn-centred. But Christmas is coming! A good season for real hymns. The time when some of us specially remember how God wasn't content to send down a book, a picture or a video, but to come himself, in person, in the flesh and for real. I recommend it.

I also recommend finding something more useful to put in that space in our living rooms than a mechanised box of dangerous illusions, and something more constructive to do with our money than passing it on to people who just can't handle it. And which may further the purposes of the arrival of the real Jesus on this small, temporary but real planet.

If it's on the telly!

Suspicious minds

Christopher Idle