Category — TV and Radio

BBC One TV will be airing the first of six episodes of The Omid Djalili Show tomorrow (Saturday) night at 9:30 p.m.

Most stand-up comedians who are commissioned to write and perform first-time TV shows are given a try-out out on BBC Three TV before moving to the mass audience BBC One. Omid has gone straight to the mass audience channel.

He’s interviewed on the back page of Radio Times (the edition for the week beginning tomorrow).

I guess this is a first for a UK Baha’i. One in the eye for the Iranian government, too, given that no Baha’i artists, musicians, etc, are allowed to perform in Iran (see my previous post about the Iranian music student).

Technorati Tags: Baha’i, Bahai, Omid Djalili, comedy

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

I always get a bit nervous when I do a live interview on radio, and I certainly got nervous in the run-up to appearing as a guest on London-based Premier Christian Radio’s Unbelievable show earlier today. It’s a discussion and phone-in show and I was in the studio with another (Christian) guest from 12.15 to 1.30 pm.

On the website, the show is billed thus:

Can Christianity really live up to the claims it makes? Justin Brierley invites you to join the debate by calling 08450 212121.

And the front page of Premier Christian Radio’s website showed this:

Weekend Highlights:

Saturday

6-12noon Premier’s Big Breakfast: with Dave Rose and Tony Miles
12-2pm Unbelievable: Bahai follower Barney Leith joins Justin Brierley and his Christian guest Kumar Rajagopalan

I had never listened to the station, let alone to the show, so I didn’t know whether it was a set-up - ‘Let’s rip into this Bah?’? faith’ - or a genuine dialogue. Well, I’m glad to say it was a genuine dialogue. I had given Justin Brierley links to The Bah?’?s web portal and he had done his homework. He had also passed the links on to Kumar, the other guest, who was a very nice Baptist minister, who had become a Christian having been raised in a high caste Brahmin Hindu family.

Justin was very fair in his presentation and gave me every opportunity to speak at some length about the Faith and to quote from the Holy Writings. Kumar and I got into a very natural dialogue and found a good measure of unity between us in speaking about our respective faiths. In fact, we’ve swapped contact details and promised to keep in touch.

I prepared, oh how I prepared for this show! I prayed, I read, I printed out suitable quotations from the Writings - including:

Know thou that when the Son of Man yielded up His breath to God, the whole creation wept with a great weeping. By sacrificing himself, however, a fresh capacity was infused into all created things. Its evidences, as witnessed in all the peoples of the earth, are now manifest before thee. The deepest wisdom which the sages have uttered, the profoundest learning which any mind hath unfolded, the arts which the ablest hands have produced, the influence exerted by the most potent of rulers, are but manifestations of the quickening power released by His transcendent, His all-pervasive, and resplendent Spirit.

This particular quotation defused the concerns of one Christian caller, who was about to ask what I, as a Bah?’?, thought of Christ. Having heard the quotation, he decided to ask something else.

I was able to tell something of the stories of the B?b and Bah?’u'll?h as well as speaking about progressive revelation and about the Bah?’? life. Above all, I was able to speak about my heart’s link to Bah?’u'll?h and to show that the Faith is spiritually as well as intellectually satisfying. One of the show’s themes was, ‘Why is the Bah?’? Faith united when Christianity has so many sects and denominations?’ Of course, this allowed a brief presentation of the Covenant and of the administrative order.

The Faith was treated with great respect on this show, which really aimed to promote the investigation of truth and to give listeners more knowledge and deeper understanding of the Faith. Despite my initial nervousness, I really enjoyed taking part in this show.

Technorati Tags: Baha’i, Bahai, Christianity, media

The day the clocks went forward to British Summer Time and I lost an hour’s sleep, the BBC whisked me off at 6.45am (5.45am by my body clock) in a silver car to Broadcasting House to do an interview on BBC Radio 4’s Sunday programme. You can pick up a link to listen to the programme from the programme’s website. Look for the segment entitled Baha’i persecution. The interview was about the latest and very worrying development in the persecution of the Baha’is in Iran.

The programme goes out from Manchester. I was in London sitting in a studio the size of a walk-in closet. There was a safety notice on the wall proclaiming that there must be no more than three people in the studio. Fat chance, I thought. More than three and there’d be a serious risk of asphyxiation.

Anyway, I sat in the studio, wearing headphones and supping coffee. Seven o’clock came and I heard nothing. Seven-fifteen came and I thought they’d forgotten me. Then my mobile rang. It was the studio in Manchester. Was I in the studio? Yes, I said, but I can’t hear anything. There’s a technical hitch, they said, and the engineers in Broadcasting House would sort it out. A few moments later I could hear the programme. They were in the middle of a package about whether God could be seen as feminine as well as masculine. Can one pray ‘Our Mother…’ just as one prays ‘Our Father…’?

The PA came on the line and said they’d be on to me after the package.

After I’d done the interview, the PA came back on and told me that they’d been able to hear me in Manchester, even though I hadn’t been able to hear them. They’d been shouting at me to see if was awake. So, even the mighty BBC can suffer its glitches!

Technorati Tags: Baha’i, Bahai, BBC

Technorati Tags: BBC Radio 4, Iran

I have just finished four scripts for Pause for Thought for BBC Radio 2. I’ll be recording these on Monday 15 March. Three of them will air on 5, 6 and 7 April, but I’m not sure when the fourth one will be broadcast.

The scripts are ‘Baha’i-lite’. I’ve been writing ‘pause for thought’ type scripts for many years. I did several series on the BBC World Service, but the ones I’ve been doing for the last few years go out sometime before 6.30am on BBC Radio 2’s Sarah Kennedy show. I used to write about the Faith much more directly than I do now. Apparently Sarah Kennedy’s listeners can’t take anything too heavy at that time of the morning, so the scripts have to have a story - preferably personal to me - and make a moderate moral point.

The problem is that I really prefer BBC Radio 4, much more heavyweight. My thinking and writing style is much more Radio 4 than Radio 2, so I have to put myself in a particular frame of mind to write these scripts. This means they take a long time to write and the fee I get paid for writing and recording them comes down to a rather pathetic hourly rate.

Anyway, to give you a sense of what they’re like, here’s one I made earlier…

Technorati Tags: Baha’i, Bahai, BBC, religion, scripts

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I watched Rod Liddle’s programme, The New Fundamentalists, on Channel 4 last night. It seemed a very weak programme to me. Liddle’s journalism begged the question, a logical fallacy in which you assume what you wish to prove. Well, he assumed that evangelical Christians are a major danger to British society and then set out to prove it.

The foci of this rather disjointed film were: evangelical attitudes to sexuality, including abstinence from sex outside marriage (which is also a Bah?’? teaching) and homosexuality (also a Bah?’? teaching). He tried to portray these attitudes and behaviours as dangerous perversions and interviewed a group leader from the Silver Ring Thing, which bills itself as a ‘high tech, high energy’ programme for young people to persuade them to pledge sexual abstinence until they marry. The group leader and the young girl who had made the pledge both came over as rather naive, but Liddle assumed that sexual ‘freedom’ (aka permissiveness) is the norm and decried the belief that sexual abstinence was the best way to prevent the spread of sexually transmitted diseases (stds).

The received liberal view is that the most effective way to prevent the spread of stds is to use condoms. It seems that the SRT people don’t talk about condoms and that there’s a fairly high lapse rate by kids who’ve made their pledge. Amongst those, allegedly, there’s a higher level of stds than amongst the condom-using population of young people. I have to say I don’t know the science on this - and clearly barrier methods, such as condoms, are going to be the most effective means of preventing spread of stds amongst the sexually active. However, this does not explain why abstinence is, allegedly, less effective. It would seem to depend on whether young people can stick to abstinence at the time of their lives when the hormones are flooding through their bodies and they are at the peak of their sexual drive. There’s no doubt that this is very challenging for most young people and it is very important that they are supported (in a non-guilt-trip way) by their families and their peers. Clearly it is easier to be abstinent if you live in an abstinent culture.

Liddle interviewed Colin Dye, senior minister at the Kensington Temple, a large Elim Pentecostal church in London. Dye was very clear about the church’s teaching on homosexuality. Once again, Liddle ridiculed this, assuming that active homosexuality is OK. He also interviewed a gay man who had been through a counselling programme with Living Waters ministries, ‘an in-depth, Christ-centred program for people seeking healing in areas of sexual and relational brokenness’. The man, who was interviewed under conditions of anonymity, said he had tried to follow the programme but had decided he was still gay. Liddle asserted that the Living Waters programme teaches that people become homosexual because of the way they are brought up and implied that homosexuality is innate and a fixed characteristic. If so, the science is not with him. Sexual formation is a complex area of human character and behaviour; it certainly isn’t just nature OR nurture, but very likely a bit of each.

The Bah?’? teachings on homosexuality are summed up in this extract from the Bah?’? world website:

Bah??? law limits permissible sexual relations to those between a man and a woman in marriage. Believers are expected to abstain from sex outside matrimony. Bah???s do not, however, attempt to impose their moral standards on those who have not accepted the Revelation of Bah??u?ll?h. While requiring uprightness in all matters of morality, whether sexual or otherwise, the Bah??? teachings also take account of human frailty and call for tolerance and understanding in regard to human failings. In this context, to regard homosexuals with prejudice would be contrary to the spirit of the Bah??? teachings.

The Bah?’? Network on Aids, Sexuality, Addictions and Abuse (BNASAA) is a useful resource on Bah?’? attitudes and teachings on sexuality.

Liddle also visited an evangelical Christian street programme to rescue drug addicts. He had to admit that it was very successful (when I was counselling alcohol abusers in Shetland, I was familiar with research that showed that the most effective way to combat an addiction is religious conversion). He was reduced to criticizing the music that this particular outfit played on the street to attract people.

A large part of the programme was given over to an investigation of the Emmanuel Schools Foundation in the north east of England. These schools were established and funded by a wealthy evangelical Christian businessman, Sir Peter Vardy. The foundation’s website says this:

The EMMANUEL Schools Foundation exists to promote the highest possible standards within comprehensive secondary education through provision based upon Christian principles.

The Foundation is based in the North-east of England and its schools operate within areas of socio-economic deprivation. The schools are non-fee-paying and work with the Department for Education and Skills and their local communities in their pursuit of ‘personal best’ achievement for all students.

By valuing every individual, regardless of ability, and by welcoming those of all Faiths and of none, the schools place the Person of Christ and His example at the centre of their inspiration as they mould a curriculum appropriate for students of the 21st century.

Liddle’s argument against the schools centred on two things: they are state schools run by Christians who allegedly push Christianity down the children’s throats; and they teach creationism alongside evolutionary theory, both of which they allegedly portray as faith positions. He also objected to the strictness of the discipline in the schools and filmed a meeting of parents of children at the Doncaster academy who were, apparently, furious at the way the school treated their children. Allegedly the children are not allowed to leave the classroom to go to the toilet and this has led to humiliation and embarrassment for girls who are having periods and cannot change their sanitary towels.

Liddle’s main weapon against creationism was incredulity. ‘You believe that the world was created in six days,’ he challenged the Principal. ‘You can’t really believe that?’ The Principal affirmed that he did believe it, it was in the Bible and he believed what the Bible said. However, that was his personal belief. It was not something the school thrust upon the children.

Now, I agree that it is worrying that people in the 21st century can believe that the world was created in six days, that creationism is dignified in some places as a ’science’, when it patently is not. But holding such a belief surely cannot disqualify a person from having a senior position in a school, if he or she is properly qualified and competent as a teacher or administrator.

I’m afraid Liddle showed himself up very badly. Repeated incredulity does not make a logical argument, nor does it make for good journalism. It is certainly not a way of getting at the truth.

As far as the discipline in the schools was concerned, one group of parents and children said they liked it. It seems pretty clear that the schools are very popular. There were Muslim pupils to be seen in the classes, which looked orderly, well run and conducive to learning. The Principle said that there had been a higher than average rate of exclusions in the first year, but his aim was to bring the exclusion rate to below average very quickly. Liddle and some of the disaffected parents in Doncaster claimed that the schools’ good results were boosted by excluding the less able and thus operating a hidden selection policy. This was denied by the school.

There’s no doubt that discipline is essential to learning. The programme gave no context to the stories of those who had been excluded - for example, one boy in Doncaster allegedly for smoking off the school premises and out of school hours. We did not hear the other side of the story - and there’s almost always another side to every such story.

In my view, Liddle did not make his case. The Emmanuel Foundation schools looked very good. I think there is a concern about state schools being run on evangelical Christian principles if there is no alternative school for children to attend. This is certainly a point that the British Humanist Association would make. And it would be deeply concerning if children were being taught that Darwinian evolution is a ‘faith position’ and that creationism is equally valid. I am not convinced, however, that this is the case. The schools are certainly not being run by ‘an extreme religious sect’, as the Channel 4 website claims.

Liddle made his own position quite clear. He is ‘a sort of’ Christian, part of the liberal Anglican church that values doubt above the kind of Biblical certainties that the evangelicals hold to (and which are part of their attraction to many). He admitted that this liberal wing of the Church is declining, while the evangelical wing is growing and is full of confidence. Now, I am a Bah?’?, not a Christian (but I believe that Jesus is a Manifestation of God, indeed the Son of God, understood in an inclusive way). I am certainly no evangelical. I sway between doubt and faith all the time, but I do not see how one can make doubt the centre of a faith. Bah?’u'll?h speaks of certitude - a deep-seated soul-knowledge that is not a form of bigotry; we may achieve certitude, but we always have to acknowledge that there are many more meanings to the Word of God than we can ever be aware of. No matter how long we explore the Word, we will never come to the end of its meanings. This is the greatest protection against fundamentalism in the Bah?’? Faith.

There is value in the liberal position, but liberalism (and I’m not referring to the policies of the Liberal Democrats, by the way) has become closed and dogmatic in its own ways and blinds its adherents, such as Rod Liddle, to the possibility that liberalism may have seriously damaged the moral fabric of society.

Whether the rise of fundamentalist Christianity is a threat to the rest of us is a moot point. I would certainly not like to live in a society ruled by the precepts and prescriptions of Christian Voice and their Director, Stephen Green, who was shown picketing a theatre in Plymouth that was staging Jerry Springer the Opera. I’ve no doubt that Rod Liddle could have gone after far more threatening, but less well known, fundamentalist Christian groups than the happy people of the Kensington Temple or the foundation that runs the Emmanuel Foundation schools in the north east of England.

Technorati Tags: Anglican, Christianity, church, evangelical, fundamentalism, politics, religion, sexuality

Can Muslims reform Islam? Can Islam be disentangled from Islamism as a political ideology? Who are the leaders of change in Islam? Ziauddin Sardar set out to answer these and other questions in his film, Battle for Islam, which was aired on BBC 1 TV on Monday 5 September.

I went to a screening yesterday evening at Chatham House (the Royal Institute for International Affairs), of which I am a member. Sardar was there to answer questions, as was Paul Jenkins, the producer. We saw the full 90 minute version of the film, which I found quite fascinating. Sardar deliberately went to what he described last night as the fringes of the Islamic world - countries such as Pakistan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Morocco, Turkey - as opposed to the Middle East heartlands of Islam.

Whom did he interview?

Technorati Tags: inter-faith, Islam, Muslim, religion

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OK, so who watched the first episode of the new Dr Who on Saturday? I taped it and watched it last night when we’d got back from Northampton.

I think it’s excellent. Christopher Eccleston is definitely the Doctor - in a new key, I’ll grant you, but definitely the Doctor. I’m glad to see that Billie Piper has a more feisty part to play as Rose Tyler than some of the Doctor’s previous companions.

I love the new interior of the TARDIS and I like the self-referential and ironic humour - I don’t think you could do it in any other way now.

I was afraid that Dr Who would be ruined, but I think the BBC’s done OK.

Thursday 03/24/05 12:53 PM

I’ve just returned from recording my Spring ‘Pause for Thought’ scripts for BBC Radio 2. My producer (Lucy Dichmont) at Unique is excellent. She really knows how to get the best out of someone reading a script, how to get the natural voice that sounds like it’s just chatting, telling a story as it comes to mind, rather than giving a lecture.

When I first did this kind of thing many years ago (on the World Service) I sounded like a Church of England vicar - or at least how the stereotypical vicar of so many comedy sketches is supposed to sound, the voice swooping up and down and up again at the end of sentences. My producer then was David Craig and he gave me my firs lessons in reading for radio. I’ve been doing Radio 2 for some time now, but it’s not really my natural habitat (as far as writing goes); I listen mostly to Radio 4 and hardly ever to Radio 2 - well, truth to tell, never to Radio 2. So I rely on the producer to help me by editing my scripts into a more Radio 2 friendly style and by prompting me to read in the right voice.

It went well today. Hot cross buns for Macmillan the cancer charity in reception (yes, I made my contribution) and then into studio. My scripts were much more story-based this time round than in the past. I mined my Shetland experiences for a couple of them. And much to my surprise I had written them in quite a dramatic way, so they read well as stories.

Note to self: next time I do PFT scripts for Radio 2 I will start with the stories and think what the moral of the stories might be afterwards. And I must collect stories or dig into my own history for stories.

20 March 2005

A 7 minute interview this morning at 7.10am - yes, I was already up and breakfasted to be ready to fast for the day - about Naw-Ruz and the Bah?’?? Faith on BBC Radio London’s In Spirit programme with Jumok? Fashola. I always enjoy talking to Jumok? - she’s one of those interviewers who treats the interview as a friendly conversation rather than as a debate or a battle of wits. We tend to laugh our way through the interview and it’s much easier to do a good interview when you’re relaxed - at least, I find it so. I can be much more down-to-earth, demotic, than when I’m doing an interview on the World Service or Radio 4, for example.

Radio is a wonderful medium, much more personal and intimate than TV. Anyway, I hate having to watch what my face is doing, to be sure that I’m not picking my nose or making silly gestures. On radio you can do interviews in your pyjamas if you want to and you can do what you like with your face and hands - although it is important to smile because the voice sounds much warmer through a smile. Curious that, but I’ve learned that over the years from experienced producers. It’s the same even if recording a Pause for Thought script. Smile, imagine your speaking to a good friend, and you sound more natural. Just think Alistair Cooke’s Letter from America: they were the gold standard of radio talks.

The first time I did radio talks was on the BBC World Service many years ago. I was working as a staff member at the Bah?’?? Centre in London when we were visited by a man who was working to establish a peace museum in Verdun, the French town around which some of the worst battles on the Western Front had taken place during the First World War. Anyway, this man, whose name I now forget, had come to London to try to raise funds and we were looking after him. I was given the job of taking him to Bush House to be interviewed for the BBC World Service. We got into the studio for the interview (by Trevor Barnes) and David Craig, the producer, sat me in front of one of the microphones and said, ‘You can give the Bah?’?? view on the peace museum’. Well, I had no idea what the Bah?’?? view was on this particular issue - I was only there to act as an escort for the main man - but I fielded some questions from Trevor Barnes and we finished the interview. As I got up to leave, David Craig took me on one side and said, ‘You have a good radio voice. We must have some material from you.’

Well, I needed no second bidding. I dropped him a reminder and before I knew where I was I’d been commissioned to write and record some scripts for Words of Faith, then the World Service’s equivalent of Pause for Thought. I was filling in for another contributor who couldn’t fulfil his contract. I was as nervous as hell, but David Craig gave me my first lessons in radio delivery. ‘We can’t have you sounding like a Church of England vicar,’ he said, and proceeded to show me how to make a written script sound like an informal chat.

Since then I’ve worked with many different producers. Each one has his or her own particular ways of doing things, but the lessons I learned from David Craig back in the early 90s are still the foundation of what I do when I record a script.

The real gift that first time, however, wasn’t the lesson in reading scripts or even the cheque from the BBC. It was the letter I received some time later from a friend. Now, this was no ordinary letter. For a start off it was written on what looked suspiciously like toilet paper. Secondly, it came from Mongolia. Not from the Ulan Baatar, the capital, but from the remote Altai Mountains, where my friend, a musicology student, was living in a ger (the traditional felt tent) with a nomadic Mongolian family while studying the traditional music of Mongolia.

The Mongolians are not great on personal space. When your family or tribe all live together in a few gers there’s not a lot of room for personal space. In any case, survival depends on the close support of the family. But Sean isn’t a Mongolian nomad; he needed a bit of space to himself, so he’d gone into his own ger for a little privacy. The family were worried that perhaps he was ill and they followed him into his tent. To distract them he turned on his radio and began to twirl the dial. Suddenly, through the crackle and hiss, he heard a voice speaking with what he described as a Home Counties accent. He lost the voice and then there it was again. Hang on, he thought, I know that voice. It’s Barney Leith. And he’s talking about the Bah?’?? Faith.

As Sean said in his letter, two of his worlds immediately collided. The immediate world of the Mongolian nomadic family and his background world of the Bah?’?? Faith. He wrote, ‘It is late August and the first snow of the winter is beginning to fall in the remote Altai Mountains.’ And then he described how he’d come to hear me.

That was a most precious letter for me. It had made its way via the British Embassy in Ulan Baatar to London and eventually to me. It gave me an almost vertiginous feel of the shear reach of the BBC World Service. The voice of London reaches even the remotest parts of the world. David Craig had told me that some 20 million people would listen to my talks on the World Service and that, for most of them, English was a second language at best. To be honest, I found that rather intimidating. An audience of 20 million. I mean, that’s really scary! But then he gave me the wisest advice: when you speak on radio you’re speaking to just one person.

Sean was the first Bah?’?? in Mongolia and there’s now a thriving Bah?’?? community in that sparsely populated country. Sean himself is currently Managing Director of Ealing Studios.