After I had done
my piece on Our Friends in the North
for the History of the BBC website last month, John who runs that section of
the BBC site asked me about any other ideas I might have for further pieces
for this year. He sent me the list of BBC anniversaries for various services
and programmes coming up throughout 2026, and I did have a few ideas – but then
realised there was one anniversary approaching which I had already,
sort-of-accidentally, done the research for and could write a piece about.
When I was on one of my research trips to the BBC Written
Archives Centre back in 2024 for my book
When Saturday Came,
which will be out later this year, one batch of files I had asked to see were those relating
to the 1956 serial
Jesus of Nazareth. This went out on Sundays, rather
than Saturdays, so was not directly connected to what I was researching. But I
had noticed that for the eight weekends
Jesus of Nazareth ran, the usual
Saturday programmes such as
Whirligig had been moved to Fridays, and the
Saturday children’s slot had been filled with showings of Westerns on film.
I surmised that this was because
Jesus of Nazareth
had been given two days of camera rehearsal ahead of its live transmissions at
Sunday teatimes, instead of the usual one on-the-day set of studio rehearsals. This
would mean it was occupying Studio E at Lime Grove, then the children’s studio,
on Saturdays and hence why the usual Saturday programmes would not have been
able to use it and that day’s children’s shows for those eight weeks had to
be on film.
In the end, the production files for
Jesus of Nazareth
didn’t contain any information about this – although I was eventually able to
confirm my suspicion as being correct from another source. But as is so often
the case on a visit to Caversham, even though it wasn’t the direct subject of
my research, I found the
Jesus of Nazareth files fascinating to read
through. Indeed, it’s something you often have to stop yourself doing when you’re
on a research visit there – pausing to read in depth. With so much material to
get through, it’s more often a case of ‘photograph first, read later’.
But because I did find a lot of the material so
interesting, despite not having any real use for it I had photographed quite a
lot of the documents in those files. Which I realised last month meant that, with the 70
th
anniversary of the serial’s first episode coming up on February the 12
th,
I
could put a nice little article together with some of the interesting titbits
from those files, without having to go anywhere to do any new research.
You occasionally get little reminders in life of how much
you have changed as a person over the years; changes you might not be conscious
of day-to-day, but which make you stop and look back and realise how you are a
different person, in at least some ways, to the one you were years or decades
ago.
Doing this piece was one such moment for me, because I
know for certain that my younger self – as a child, a teenager, and well into
adulthood – would have been pretty disgusted with the idea of having my name
associated with anything to do with Jesus. I have been an atheist for as long
as I can remember, and when I was younger I would have found the prospect of
writing an article on a series with a subject matter like this deeply embarrassing.
These days, I am a little more relaxed about the whole
thing. Still very much an atheist, of course – although, given I do mark
Christmas, I suppose if pressed I would have to confess to having a kind of
secular Christian background. And
I did go to a Church of England primary school – so I know all the greatest hits, if not the album tracks and b-sides.
But now as a middle-aged man I can separate the two. I
can find the production history of
Jesus of Nazareth interesting, while
still not having any great enthusiasm for the subject matter. And it
is
a very interesting story to tell – the first dramatic depiction of the adult
Jesus on British television; one of the first, if not perhaps
the first,
children’s series to have foreign location filming; and among the earliest BBC
drama serials, children’s or otherwise, to survive in full.
So I am glad that I read those files, and pleased with
how the article turned out. It actually ended up going online a few days ahead
of the 70
th anniversary, as I had been
invited onto BBC Radio 4’s Sunday
programme the preceding weekend to discuss it. (I did it from the studio in Norwich, of course, rather than actually going up to Salford for early on a Sunday morning!) It was only a short item, a few
minutes, but it was nice to be on national radio in a professional capacity,
and pleasing to hear how engaged the great Edward Stourton was with the whole
thing. To the extent of echoing the praise for Caversham when I gave them a
mention – so it was all worth doing to get them a nice little plug, if nothing
else!
