This book will be the first systematic and comprehensive text to analyze the many and contrasting appearances of the Church of England on television. It covers a range of genres and programs including crime drama, science fiction, comedy, including the specific genre of ‘ecclesiastical comedy’, zombie horror and non-fiction broadcasting. Readers interested in church and political history, popular culture, television and broadcasting history, and the social history of modern Britain will find this to be a lively and timely book. Programs that year after year sit enshrined as national favourites (for example Dad’s Army and Midsomer Murders) foreground the Church. From the Queen’s Christmas Message to royal weddings and Coronation Street, the clergy and services of England’s national church abound in television. This book offers detailed analysis of landmark examples of small screen output and raises questions relating to the storytelling strategies of program makers, the way the established Church is delineated, and the transformation over decades of congregations into audiences.

British Television Animation 1997-2010 charts a moment in TV history where UK comic animation graduated from the margins as part of a post-Simpsons broadcast landscape. Shows like Monkey Dust, Modern Toss and Stressed Eric not only reflected the times but they ushered in an era of ambition and belief in British adult animation.

Since the turn of the 21st century, the television series has rivalled cinema as the paradigmatic filmic medium. Like few other genres, it lends itself to exploring society in its different layers. In the case of Great Britain and Ireland, it functions as a key medium in depicting the state of the nation. Focussing on questions of genre, narrative form, and serialisation, this volume examines the variety of ways in which popular recent British and Irish television series negotiate the concept of community as a key component of the state of the nation.

First published in 1976, Paul Johnson’s exceptional study of Christianity has been loved and widely hailed for its intensive research, writing, and magnitude—“a tour de force, one of the most ambitious surveys of the history of Christianity ever attempted and perhaps the most radical” (New York Review of Books). In a highly readable companion to books on faith and history, the scholar and author Johnson has illuminated the Christian world and its fascinating history in a way that no other has. Johnson takes off in the year AD 49 with his namesake the apostle Paul. Thus beginning an ambitious quest to paint the centuries since the founding of a little-known ‘Jesus Sect’, A History of Christianity explores to a great degree the evolution of the Western world. With an unbiased and overall optimistic tone, Johnson traces the fantastic scope of the consequent sects of Christianity and the people who followed them. Information drawn from extensive and varied sources from around the world makes this history as credible as it is reliable. Invaluable understanding of the framework of modern Christianity—and its trials and tribulations throughout history—has never before been contained in such a captivating work.

Exposes the mechanisms by which conservative Christianity dominated British culture during 1945-65 and their subsequent collapse.

This book looks at television comedy, drawn from across the UK and Ireland, and ranging chronologically from the 1980s to the 2020s. It explores depictions of distinctive geographical, historical and cultural communities presented from the insiders’ perspective, simultaneously interrogating the particularity of the lived experience of time, and place, embedded within the wide variety of depictions of contrasting lives, experiences and sensibilities, which the collected individual chapters offer. Comedies considered include Victoria Wood’s work on ‘the north’, Ireland’s Father Ted and Derry Girls, Michaela Coel’s east London set Chewing Gum, and Wales’ Gavin and Stacey. There are chapters on Scottish sketch and animation comedy, and on series set in the Midlands, the North East, the South West and London’s home counties. The book offers thoughtful reflection on funny and engaging representations of the diverse, fragmented complexity of UK and Irish identity explored through the intersections of class, ethnicity and gender.

The instant New York Times bestseller and companion book to the PBS series. “Absolutely brilliant . . . A necessary and moving work.” —Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., author of Begin Again “Engaging. . . . In Gates’s telling, the Black church shines bright even as the nation itself moves uncertainly through the gloaming, seeking justice on earth—as it is in heaven.” —Jon Meacham, New York Times Book Review From the New York Times bestselling author of Stony the Road and The Black Box, and one of our most important voices on the African American experience, comes a powerful new history of the Black church as a foundation of Black life and a driving force in the larger freedom struggle in America. For the young Henry Louis Gates, Jr., growing up in a small, residentially segregated West Virginia town, the church was a center of gravity—an intimate place where voices rose up in song and neighbors gathered to celebrate life's blessings and offer comfort amid its trials and tribulations. In this tender and expansive reckoning with the meaning of the Black Church in America, Gates takes us on a journey spanning more than five centuries, from the intersection of Christianity and the transatlantic slave trade to today’s political landscape. At road’s end, and after Gates’s distinctive meditation on the churches of his childhood, we emerge with a new understanding of the importance of African American religion to the larger national narrative—as a center of resistance to slavery and white supremacy, as a magnet for political mobilization, as an incubator of musical and oratorical talent that would transform the culture, and as a crucible for working through the Black community’s most critical personal and social issues. In a country that has historically afforded its citizens from the African diaspora tragically few safe spaces, the Black Church has always been more than a sanctuary. This fact was never lost on white supremacists: from the earliest days of slavery, when enslaved people were allowed to worship at all, their meetinghouses were subject to surveillance and destruction. Long after slavery’s formal eradication, church burnings and bombings by anti-Black racists continued, a hallmark of the violent effort to suppress the African American struggle for equality. The past often isn’t even past—Dylann Roof committed his slaughter in the Mother Emanuel AME Church 193 years after it was first burned down by white citizens of Charleston, South Carolina, following a thwarted slave rebellion. But as Gates brilliantly shows, the Black church has never been only one thing. Its story lies at the heart of the Black political struggle, and it has produced many of the Black community’s most notable leaders. At the same time, some churches and denominations have eschewed political engagement and exemplified practices of exclusion and intolerance that have caused polarization and pain. Those tensions remain today, as a rising generation demands freedom and dignity for all within and beyond their communities, regardless of race, sex, or gender. Still, as a source of faith and refuge, spiritual sustenance and struggle against society’s darkest forces, the Black Church has been central, as this enthralling history makes vividly clear.