BBC4 – which, for much of the time, is the only BBC channel worth watching – no longer has a budget for making new programmes. This apparent deprivation has also been something of a blessing, leaving the channel free to delve in the vast BBC archive of classic (or at least worth another look) programmes from happier times. Lately we've had the brilliant prison sitcom Porridge (razor-sharp scripts, perfect lead performance from Ronnie Barker); that most amiable of panel games, Call My Bluff; the unbelievably erudite (by contemporary standards) music quiz Face the Music; Simon Schama's finest work, Landscape and Memory; and now – The Sea of Faith, Don Cupitt's epic series, now 40 years old, on the history of Christian belief, which popularised the idea of 'non-realist' faith, and even led to the launch of a 'Sea of Faith' network of like-minded Christians. Such thinking was at the time highly controversial, and Cupitt found himself under attack from believers and atheists alike. He also found himself famous – to the point where he had to wear dark glasses in the street to avoid being buttonholed by passersby every few yards. Cupitt, now 90 but clearly in full possession of his marbles, recalls this strange notoriety in a short introduction to the series. He says he greatly enjoyed making The Sea of Faith, which was genuinely what so many series today claim to be – a journey of exploration – but gave the impression that he has since journeyed far beyond its theology, into realms of ever greater uncertainty, though he remains, like Wittgenstein, 'incurably religious by temperament' (like many of us).
Watching The Sea of Faith today – I've so far seen the first two parts – I was struck, of course, by how much more serious, incisive and spacious it is than anything that would get made today, and I found, to my surprise, that I had remembered quite a lot of it. One feature stands out, and marks it as a product of its time – the amount of attention Cupitt pays to Freud, a figure who was held in much higher esteem 40 years ago than he is today. But it's a wonderful series, well worth watching again, and I'm looking forward to seeing the rest of it.
Saturday, 23 November 2024
The Sea of Faith
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It is remarkable how little one hears of Freud now and how much one once did. A friend suggested that as a distinction between the modern and the post-modern.
ReplyDeleteYes, there may be something in that... Also a lot of discreditable stuff has surfaced about Freud's early practice – maybe Nabokov's 'Viennese quack' was not that wide of the mark.
DeleteNabokov's remark was completely accurate. The late Frederick Crews' great book 'Freud: The Making of an Illusion' has all the grisly details of Freud's cocaine-fueled charlatanry for those who are interested.
DeleteBut alas the exposure of Freud's intellectual dishonesty can't return us to a pre-Freudian age. He (I think disastrously) changed the way we think about ourselves and we're condemned to be post-Freudians, even if nowadays we don't often invoke his name. As Auden wrote:
'if often he was wrong and, at times, absurd,
to us he is no more a person
now but a whole climate of opinion
under whom we conduct our different lives'
Thanks, Hec. I hope the Freud effect on our culture is wearing off now, but I guess some of his legacy is inescapable. It's long seemed to me that once you've taken away the obvious tosh, what remains tells us little more about the workings of the human mind than Shakespeare does.
DeleteAnd Freud's attempts to apply his methods to Shakespeare certainly belong in the 'tosh' category. Not that he believed William Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare – Freud was a devotee of the well-named Oxonian Thomas Looney.
DeleteYou're certainly right in that most of his specific doctrines and dogmas are now generally laughed off except in the Humanities departments which predictably don't seem to have got the memo, though unfortunately his completely erroneous theory that the unconscious represses memories of traumas is still widely believed. But his influence remains in terms of the general attitude towards human motivation which he spread: the idea that people are always to be suspected of ulterior 'unconscious' motives and never really say what they mean, that our fundamental motivations are always base and selfish, the overvaluation of sex as the sole shaper of identity, and the endless theatrical self-revelations and 'therapeutic' self-obsessions of our current society. He's a major instigator of the 'hermeneutics of suspicion' which underpins the 'woke' nonsense. I don't know how we put the genie back in the bottle!
DeleteYou are also correct that all that remains once you excise all the rubbish is trivial. But I'd argue you'd learn far more about the human mind from Shakespeare than you would from Freud!
Agreed.
DeleteWe watched "The Sea of Faith" on YouTube about a year ago. It was a great series and, of course, would seem impossible to make now. I was always rather taken with the music, though I could never find out what it was.
ReplyDeleteThe music was by Nigel Osborne. It was a good fit, I think.
DeleteCall My Bluff and on the radio Stop The Week were happy examples of Robert Robinson's skill in facilitating urbane and gregarious conversation. Thanks for the tip.
ReplyDeleteAh yes, Stop the Week, a great show in its day... I also have fond memories of My Word, with Muir and Norden – but not Robinson.
DeleteI watched an episode of Call My Bluff. Great to see Patrick Campbell with his remarkable stammer. I'd completely forgotten about him which is remarkable as I thoroughly enjoyed reading some of his humorous books when in my teens.
DeleteYes, he was brilliant on Call My Bluff, and the obvious affection between him and Frank Muir was a joy to see.
DeleteThanks, Hec – I'd forgotten that phase of Call My Bluff's existence. Probably a mercy...
ReplyDeleteI still enjoyed it but I didn't know any better. It was doubtless far less offensive than Pokémon and other rubbish I was also watching at that time!
DeleteI thought of another literary reference to Call My Bluff - that awful game they play at Christmas in Kingsley Amis's 'Ending Up'. I'm now imagining a really desperate English PhD student (is there any other kind?) writing his thesis on 'Literary references to Call My Bluff'.
(Blogspot seems to have eaten my earlier comment)