In that ancient community they don’t actually sing anything we’d recognise as a hymn. By the time the final credits rolled, this ‘historic’ episode of Songs of Praise – in reality, just another opportunistic exercise in conscience-tweaking – had collapsed like a dodgy sponge on the programme that preceded it, The Great British Bake Off.
Songs of Praise from the Calais migrant camp… with NO songs! DAMIAN THOMPSON on a BBC stunt gone wrong
In a special Songs of Praise, presenter Sally Magnusson presented the show from the migrant camp in Calais
Hymns and ‘worship songs’ – all dropped in between coverage of the camp – from a mixture of sedate English congregations and fired-up African Pentecostalists. None of them anywhere near Calais. There was also an interview with a trendy Christian songwriter and a piece about Shakespeare’s faith. Uh? These segments looked as if they’d been shoehorned in at the last minute, to bulk up the show.
From time to time the camera would pan back to Sally in ‘the Jungle’, where she spoke to sincere English and French Christian volunteers ‘coming to the help of these destitute people’.
One lady wanted to bring them ‘the light of the Gospel’. Good luck with that.
Sorry to sound cynical, but the script glossed over one rather inconvenient but unavoidable fact about the camp: it is overwhelmingly Muslim.
Also – and I wonder if anyone at the Beeb knew this – St Michael’s is Ethiopian Orthodox.
In that ancient community they don’t actually sing anything we’d recognise as a hymn. By the time the final credits rolled, this ‘historic’ episode of Songs of Praise – in reality, just another opportunistic exercise in conscience-tweaking – had collapsed like a dodgy sponge on the programme that preceded it, The Great British Bake Off.
