100% agreement about the comments on news stories. It is really a mistake to read the comments on any story where the public at large is commenting. There's a "meme" going around that goes something like this:

Me: Most people are basically good at heart.
Me after reading the comments on a news story: This world must be cleansed by fire.

Probably not!

no, not that. I've put it in an email to you along with my 52 Albums piece, to preclude any spoilers.

You may not want to. It's not a pretty story. But then the others weren't either.

I have been waiting for this post to show up all day--looking right at it--commenting on it--and not realizing that this was it.

Gah!

I thought it was really good that they made her a very plain, unglamorous, not-young woman. It reduced the potential salaciousness of the story.

That's funny, Janet.

To think it was written 24 years ago, and was so perceptive. :-)

I was going to say prescient.

AMDG

Going to watch The Fall 3 next, as it just came in through the library. A friend warns me that the first episode is quite gory -- not violent so much as "clinically" gory. We shall see.

I watched several episodes of Mrs. Maisel with my mother while in Missouri recently, and it is well made.

So, Funny Face--My Fair Lady. I guess musical comedies rise and fall by whether or not Audrey Hepburn is in them.

AMDG

Was the "Oh no!" scene in the 4th episode?

AMDG

I saw Mrs Maisel advertised... on Twitter.

" I must say, however, that I remain puzzled to say the least about the function of the British monarchy."

Peter Hitchens describes it as being like the King on the chess board. He occupies a space that other powerful forces can't. I urge you read him on this topic if you're at all interested. I like the analogy myself, but don't feel capable of explaining it well.

Turns out the episode I was watching was 6 and not 4. We got to the end when I thought there were 2 or 3 episodes still left. I liked it much better than Season 2.

AMDG

It's on his blog. Probably simplest to google the term you want plus hitchensblog. Or you could look at his tags on the sidebar.

Ha, guess you've forgotten what I said about Broadchurch, especially #3, this past April. I've been lying kind of low, hoping you might have, since I'm so obviously the odd one here. ;-)

It was what I said right before that, Mac, which I thought would make you all want to throw me into the outer darkness: "Broadchurch 3 just finished here in New Zealand as well, and, gosh, I can't believe anyone actually thought it was well done. I thought it was awful in just about every way."

It's Christmas morning here in New Zealand, so I'll wish you all a very Merry Christmas!

Just in order to make Marianne feel better, I thought The Crown was appalling, and stopped watching after a handful of episodes of Season 1. In specific: the reason I stopped watching was that the movie was a horrendous 'Dianification' of the monarchy. Usually when people talk about the Dianification of the monarchy, they mean turning the members of the royal family into celebrities or generally treating the monarchy in an overly personalized way. I mean it more specifically than that - that the divorces of the older members of the royal family, starting with Edward and then going on to Margaret's flirtation with a married man, Peter Townsend, are all viewed through the lens of the divorce of Diana and Charles. Its all about the royal family's neurotic, antiquated attitude to divorce. Nothing to do with what many Anglicans still thought about divorce in the 1950s. Diana always claimed that Charles came to dislike her because she was more popular than he was. The final episode of the Crown for me was where Elizabeth I goes to Ireland with Peter Townsend and he gets cheered more loudly than she does. Elizabeth promptly puts her foot down and insists that Margaret break off her affair with him. That was the end for me. I'm a bit surprised that Americans don't see the problem with this show. They look completely baffled when I try to explain and I don't get far. I suppose that for all Americans the British Monarchy is a Diana Monarchy. They just see it as personalities.

Marianne, that exposure of my crazier side goes out for you!

Im watching Deutschland 83 right now, at home after a foot operation.

Merry Christmas !!

Grumpy, I just assumed the Crown would be something I would dislike. Your description seems to confirm that.

I have flip-flopped a bit on the Monarchy over my lifetime - having been pretty republican (ie not monarchist) in my 20s and 30s, probably partly in reaction to Royal scandals.

If it's on Netflix, I can't watch it anyway.

I think when the Queen finally dies,I'll be pretty gutted, in very large part because she has been the reigning monarch for my whole life, and also because I think it will become a travesty after she's gone.

I say this as an Australian Catholic, who has mixed feelings about both Britain and the Church of England. But basically I equate the deterioration of the monarchy as a sign of the general destruction of modern society, including the attack on the Rule of Law. It distresses me.

Most interesting comments on The Crown and the monarchy. I'm not able to respond now but would like to. Should have a chance to tomorrow late. Merry Christmas to all!

Mac, it’s been a while since I watched it, but I thought the acting of Olivia Colman and David Tennant was way off the mark in Broadchurch #3 -- Colman was crying, or at least teared-up, practically the whole time, and Tennant’s rage was more than a tad too much. Even worse, though, was comparing what the mother of the boy who was murdered in Broadchurch #1 was feeling with what the rape victim in #3 was feeling as being basically the same -- I found that horribly wrong. And then there were smaller things, like the traumatized victim of the attack never closing the curtains on the windows in her house at night, which drove me nuts.

About The Crown, Grumpy says:

"I mean it more specifically than that - that the divorces of the older members of the royal family, starting with Edward and then going on to Margaret's flirtation with a married man, Peter Townsend, are all viewed through the lens of the divorce of Diana and Charles. Its all about the royal family's neurotic, antiquated attitude to divorce. Nothing to do with what many Anglicans still thought about divorce in the 1950s. "

I was surprised to hear this. And it just goes to show...something or other, I'm not sure what. Something to do with the power of what one brings to a drama like this, I guess. Because I didn't see it that way *at all*. In fact I saw it in the way you seem to be implying would be the right way with respect to what was really going on. For me it was precisely about what many Anglicans and in particular Elizabeth thought about divorce. Certainly you have a better sense of what present-day Britain would see in it, and what the filmmakers likely intended--a sort of slam against E and anyone else with "antiquated" views about divorce. But if that's so they failed utterly with me. I saw Elizabeth as placing her office as head of both church and state ahead of her personal sympathies. It seemed heroic to me at several points. Yes, she's portrayed as staid and so forth. But in my view her staidness comes off as having something noble about it. If that irks the filmmakers, so much the better. I mean, by the end of the thing I was singing "God Save The Queen" and thinking the American Revolution might not have been such a great idea.

The Dianafication of the monarchy...what does that mean to me?...I've never really given it much thought, though I had a vague sense that something was wrong with that picture. But now that I stop and think about it: it's not exactly the celebrity-izing of the royal family in general, but the way Diana herself, specifically, became the Kim Kardashian of the day. To what extent she sought that, and to what extent it was thrust upon her, I don't know. I never really paid much attention to the whole thing, but somehow I never had a good impression of her. Had the impression that she was an attention-seeker, and somehow not the stuff of which monarchs should be made. Which seems to be a minority view on the whole. And I was sort of appalled by the hysteria that followed her death. So American, in a not-good way.

I haven't yet listened to the Queen's Christmas message, but I will.

You're misconstruing me. I'm not disagreeing with you. I don't mean that those things aren't there. I'm only describing my reaction to them. I'm saying that even if the filmmakers' intentions were as you describe, which you're probably right about, being acquainted with the UK reality, I didn't react the way I was meant to.

Maybe that's partly because I'm obtuse but it's also partly because I believe in many of the same things Elizabeth does, and where the writers mean for me to see bad I see good. Makes me think of All In the Family. You were supposed to despise Archie Bunker, but a lot of people cheered him unironically.

Marianne, I agree that the Queen is a great public inspiration. I think Damian Thompson's constant griping against the bishops is kind of toxic. I don't listen to his podcast.

"felt" not "fell"

Yes. If you google something like "broadchurch series 4" you'll see what they're saying. It's almost a complete rejection of the idea, at best only a distant possibility of a 4th.

"I think that part of what Maclin is saying is that we are looking at this from outside, so we just don't see what you see--not because you are wrong, but because we are blind to it."

Yes, exactly. Not saying Grumpy is wrong at all.

yes, Twitter is very interesting for the articles it sends one on to!

Im so often sent on to something good in the Guardian I feel like making them a donation!

I do see what Mac and Janet mean - the analogy with the south explains a lot.

Yes, I did to. I assume there is some reasonable factual foundation for it.

I've had the same thought about the Guardian. I frequently run across good things there. Left-wing but not so doctrinaire as to seem irrational.

Another thing in the series which I may not have reacted to as the writers intended: the portrayals of Elizabeth knocking about in the Scottish countryside in boots and a headscarf. I don't know if we were supposed to think "what a dullard" or not, but it just made me like her.

The mention of the Queen in a headscarf made me think of a BBC documentary on her that I saw on PBS many years ago, which showed her scarfed and walking about on one her properties, looking at and talking about horses; you can even see her driving a Land Rover. It's up on YouTube here. The scarf part starts around the 19:45 mark, and she's zooming along in the Land Rover at around 21:25.

I was quite surprised, 20-odd years ago, to hear a canon of an Anglican cathedral enthusing about Billy Graham, and what an impact he'd had on him in 1954. From what little I know of him he just seems so un-CofE.

"at best only a distant possibility of a 4th"

In the bonus material on the discs of series 3 the creator/writer Chris Chibnall said that they've completed the story as he conceived it and that for all intents and purposes it's finished.

Yes, good for them.

Rob, that's pretty much what I found when I looked for info about a 4th season. It was only the use of faint qualifiers such as "for all intents and purposes" that there was even a theoretical possibility of opening the door.

I see there are new episodes of Travellers. I wish I could remember it better.

AMDG

I saw that on Facebook, shared by two or three people in addition to you, Grumpy. But WSJ wouldn't let me see it as a non-subscriber. Maybe I just didn't try hard enough. I'll be surprised if I find out Janet subscribes to it.

I think I liked Travelers better than you did.

I had no trouble accessing that article.

AMDG

I assume with any historical drama that everything that isn't a documented public event is mostly invented. So I think I'm not letting the slant, whatever it is, become reality in my mind. But I'm probably influenced anyway.

Back when the Dan Brown controversy was raging, I was amazed and not amused at the number of his defenders who, when challenged on its factual accuracy, would sneer "It's FICTION!" and in the next breath tell you how it exposed the evil of the Catholic Church.

From what Noonan says, even public events are falsified in The Post, and I just recently heard an interview with the woman who wrote the screenplay talking about her research.

AMDG

Its a sign of the death of the historical imagination. They just can't put themselves back in time. I didn't watch Victoria, but I know my sister did and she was not delighted.

Im going to go out on a limb about Billy Graham, and we know I'm not a scholar of church history. I know about enough to get catholic freshmen through one or two classes on the Reformation if we have to. I've read about three books on it in my life, so its not a specialist area of study.

I used to have a church historian colleague who said that the idea of the Anglican 'via media' - ie the idea of Anglicanism as a middle way between Catholicism and Protestantism - was a later invention. He was a reformation scholar, who creates editions of some reformation chap like Bucer. So I thought he should know, although of course other scholars might disagree with him. I don't know how much later he meant by 'later' - did he think 'via media ism' came in with Laud, in the 17th century, or in the 18th century, I'm not sure. But the meaning of his statement was that the original clerics around Henry VII and Elizabeth I were hard core Protestants, whether that means unremitting Calvinists or lutherans or Puritans. I have no means of judging whether my friend's view is correct, but it seems plausible, because until at least the later half of the 16th century, as Elizabeth's brand of the English reformation got going, there simply wasn't the conditions for a 'middle way.' There were simply Puritans and Catholics who hated each other. You have to have a sense of Catholicism and Protestantism as stable going concerns before you can call yourself a via media between the two. I might have said William Laud, archbp of Cantuar under Charles I, would be the beginnings of the 'middle way' idea of Anglicanism, because by then you have Catholics who know that the 'Anglican church state' is never going away and who have reconciled to it, and actually want a superior version of Catholicism, not something entirely different from it. But the Puritans find this too Catholic, and off comes Charles I's head! I'm afraid that such a version of the history of the church of England as I can come up with is pretty sub '1066 and all That'. However, let's say that by the time of Laud, in the 1640s, you have 'Evangelicals' or the original Puritans and you also have via media people. The puritans/calvinists/evangelicals revived in the early 19th century and there's a huge revival of faith - Newman was originally drawn to this. The puritan/evangelical/calvinist revival is a reaction against the Via Media, which by now has drifted into the 'broad church,' which is 19th century Anglican liberalism. Then Newman helps to create the ritualist movement, the Oxford movement or whatever one wants to call it - the Anglican high church. So then there are three wings to Anglicanism - the original evangelical/puritan/calvinist, the Via Media people, and the Anglican high church, who call themselves 'Anglo-Catholics.'

Of those three groups, the puritan/calvinists are the only ones I can see being at all attractive to the young Elizabeth. In her youth, in the 1940s and 1950s, the high church Anglicans were left wing, they had a long term aim of reconciliation with 'Rome', on their own terms of course, they always tried too hard to be more Catholic than the pope, using the Sarum rite and other oddities. Its not an attractive group to the head of the Church of England. The broad church people would not be appealing to a pious and rather conservative young woman. The other thing is - Scotland, where she is not the head of the Church (! ask a presbyterian Scot what they think about that idea!), but where the royal family spends a lot of time, and where they have private, Presbyterian chaplains. So there's always a strong Presbyterian/Calvinist input to the religion of the royal family, because they need to be head of that country too, if not head of the church of Scotland (!). So the Queen is by default a kind of Anglican Evangelical.
No, I cannot see the Queen as an Evangelical like the English Evangelicals I have known, simply because they were too middle class! But I don't know. In any case, I don't find the association with Billy Graham baffling. No, of course twentieth century American evangelicism is not just the same thing as the 16th century puritanism which is at the theological roots of the Anglican communion. But Billy Graham is some kind of modern analogue of the founders of Elizabeth's religion.

I have an English friend who is a rather hardline Calvinist, and who writes pieces on a well known magazine of religion and public life which take many, many hits. Like me he came to America from England, and like me he knew the English evangelicals in his youth. I once remarked to him that an evangelical woman in our (Scottish) university was just like the evangelicals I had known at school thirty years before. Yes, he said with no little distaste, 'congealed in aspic.'

I admire the Queen immensely, and so don't get me wrong. But I'd say she is kind of congealed in an aspic which has somehow preserved the certitudes of English evangelical middle class rural culture unchanged for 60 years. No, she's not middle class, she's part of the rural gentry, wearing a headscarf like all women of that class.

In case anyone else is like me and had no idea what Paul is referring to:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bb/Percy_Jocelyn_Bishop_of_Clogher_by_Cruikshank.jpg

Janet and Marianne--yeah, I suppose I may be given the makers of these historical dramas too much credit for honesty. I don't remember a gay story line in Victoria--is it in the 2nd series, which hasn't shown here yet? That's pretty appalling. My reaction to such fabricating is not as tolerant as "whatever".

I did find, in watching both Victoria and The Crown, that when I looked up info about known historical events it seemed that they were accurate. But, for instance, although Lord Melbourne was a sort of mentor for Victoria, he was not at all as portrayed.

As it happens my wife and I just last night watched Hidden Figures, the movie about three African-American women who worked for NASA in the '50s and '60s. Afterwards I looked up the history, and it appears that a whole lot of the movie was simply made up--that they filmmakers had taken some people who really existed and really worked for NASA, and made up a story about them. I was a little shocked. Ostensibly the movie is based on an ostensibly factual book, so I don't know whether the author of the book shares any blame.

It’s much easier for evangelicals to convert because they have no ecclesiology no interest in ritual and they believe in the Lord Jesus Christ.

Yes, I was going to mention Hidden Figures. After watching the movie, I wanted to read the book because I knew a lot of that stuff was bunk.

The book is not the best-written book ever, but it appears to be very factual.

The dress code--nothing about that except that the women wore sturdy shoes because of the condition of the grounds.

The restroom thing--there were colored restrooms (sorry but that's what they are called) that were marked, but the others weren't, so the woman just used the white restrooms. It doesn't seem to have been a deal at all.

So many things, it's maddening because all the propaganda of the movie undermines the real accomplishment of these women.

AMDG

I *think*--not 100% sure, but I think I've heard in Ordinariate scuttlebut that some Anglo-Catholics (i.e. actual English ones) really don't want anything to do with the BCP. Whereas for me the whole point, almost, is to get Prayer Book English in the liturgy. Take away that and the hymns and the "Anglican patrimony" doesn't amount to all that much for me.

I was talking to an ordinariate priest today, and he told me that the Evangelical anglicans are much more likely to convert than the high church people, because the high church people think they already have it, whereas the evangelicals realize they don't. He said that the greatest number of converts these days are from Evangelical anglicans on the islands of the Torres strait between Australia and New Guinea.

I'm not so sure that that's broadly true, Robert. It does seem to be a tendency for those who consciously call themselves Catholic--the actual and self-designated Anglo-Catholics, who do indeed believe the already have Catholicity, so what's the point, and besides, "the Romans" are sort of yucky, as Grumpy notes.

But you can be "high church" well short of claiming in a formal and theological way to be Catholic. At least in this country I think it tends to be the high(er) church types in general more than the evangelicals who convert. The three-way split here is, roughly, high church and orthodox in a Catholic direction, low church and orthodox in a Protestant-evangelical direction, and of course heterodox, the ruling party in the Episcopal Church. In my experience the second group are not much interested in converting, because they are truly Protestant.

BTW of course I don't mean to cast any aspersions on the Ordinariate groups. If there was such a thing in my area I would have gone and taken a look. When I left the CofE I missed the BCP and even Series II tremendously.

These days we have a new professor of Patristics who is an Egyptian convert from Islam to Melkite Catholicism. He became a priest just a few years ago, before he came to the MidWest, and says a Melkite mass on campus. Its drawing a largish crowd of grad students types and yours truly.

He probably said Anglo-Catholic. I just misreported it.