My British boyfriend is good for many things. Among them is introducing me to hilarious British programming. I have no idea how he knows that any of these programs are around since he’s been in Montreal for 2 years, without having made a trip back to the UK.
Here is a small list of programs he’s brought into my life, and I recommend them all.
Gavin & Stacey (“Oh! What’s occurrin’?”)
That Mitchell & Webb Look (“We have numberwang!”)
Peep Show (“Captain Corrigan is up to the task.”)
8 out of 10 cats
Q.I.
Outnumbered (“Up your beeping beep beep!”)
About that last one. In truth, it’s just a family sitcom. One normal family, with a mum and dad just trying to keep up with their 3 kids. What I love about the show, besides its caustic humour, is that the kids aren’t props. The mum and dad never get to finish a sentence because they keep being interrupted by one (or all) of their kids. When they have a moment to speak to each other, you always hear the kids in the background. When the kids speak to the parents, they’re having a real conversation where the parents aren’t trying to make their kids understand something complex by using a cutesie voice or the precursor, “Sometimes, when people…” The kids ask honest questions, the parents answer honestly, and sometimes, it creates hugely hilarious awkwardness, especially when the mum or dad get cornered into life’s many exceptions to the rules (something kids don’t often make sense of).
Here’s one of my favourite clips. It had me in stitches well into yesterday evening, even when we weren’t watching the show any more. Enjoy!
In the right hands, sermons can be brilliant essays.
As a young girl, I forced my then-godless mother to come with me to church. At age 7, I’d gotten baptized because the rest of the kids in my class were going to get their first communion, and I was left out of the activities. Like hell I was gonna sit in a faraway pew and watch my best friends Melanie and Marcelle wear pretty dresses as they rehearsed to receive their first host! So, I promptly got myself baptized, got a beautiful tartan dress for the first communion, and started attending church with Mumzie.
The nice thing about a Catholic service (compared to certain Protestant Sundays, which I would experience as a teenager out of curiosity) is that it only lasts an hour. Most of it is spent making gestures with your hands, kneeling, getting up, sitting, kneeling again, and giving the priests your memorized responses on cue. As a reward for enduring the first, unchanging half-hour, you’re then treated to the priest’s homily. The sermon portion of our program takes a good 15-20 minutes, and I usually don’t care for any of it. As a child, my eyes would wander around the room, looking for stories to make up about people, or just for other children secretly misbehaving. As an adolescent, when I attended Protestant churches, I took this time to exchange notes with my friend James. We spent one sermon debating whether or not Basic Instinct deserved an R or X rating. If his preacher-man dad only knew…
Obviously, I didn’t pay much attention to the content of the sermons. I did try, though, and while I was usually lost at about the 7-minute mark, I did grasp one constant that fascinated me. How do priests and ministers take an every-day issue (like, waiting in line at the grocery store to buy milk) and bring it back to god?
These days, I’m the one who’s godless, and my mother returned to the Catholic church (on her own, with no terminal disease to help her). Just the same, I can appreciate a well-constructed point, and that’s what a sermon is supposed to be. Granted, some do it better than others. One minister that I recall only had one answer for everything: god. Anything that didn’t fit into the god mould had to be of the devil, and that was about that. I didn’t care so much that I got bored of his sermons, though I was concerned about the people who believed any of it. They must live in a scary world.
The other night, I watched the movie Doubt, about a priest who’s suspected of molesting boys. The film begins with a sermon, and later on, the priest takes notes for his next homily, saying he gets ideas all the time, from all sorts of things. And I wondered how some of them do get their ideas. I also thought about how it can’t be easy to have to think of yet another way to tie everything to god, in a compelling way, for 15 or more minutes every week.
I don’t know what everybody’s process is, but my friend’s brother is a Presbyterian minister, and he took to the web. To develop the ideas for his sermons, he spends time blogging of vlogging about different issues that face modern faith. Though he’s a Christian through and through, I find him progressive. He really wants to immerse Christianity in a thoughtful, intellectual dialogue. So he jams it out online. I particularly enjoy the way he wants to eliminate fear from faith, and other types of silliness that believers can sometimes all too easily adhere to.
Check out his blog, and this video, one of my favourites.
My British boyfriend is good for many things. Among them is introducing me to hilarious British programming. I have no idea how he knows that any of these programs are around since he’s been in Montreal for 2 years, without having made a trip back to the UK.
In the right hands, sermons can be brilliant essays.
OLIVIA COLLETTE 