The news that Newcastle Cathedral is going to host monthly comedy nights, complete with “full bar” and merchandise outlet, has annoyed a former chaplain to the Queen. Dr Gavin Ashenden described it as “a misuse” and feared the “awesome” cathedral would be reduced to “an O2 Arena or a nightclub”. “If the diocese of Newcastle wants to have comedians, it should hire a comedy club,” he said, “but to do it in a cathedral is offensive to everyone who thinks a cathedral is a holy space.”
I like comedy but it’s hard to immediately dismiss this view. You imagine a comedy gig-style lighting state, all reds and greens and lager brand gobos flickering up the walls, and it all feeling somehow diabolical in the context of shadowy gothic architecture. And then in the middle, the confident standup, spotlit, microphone in hand, swearing and talking about being dumped and saying that the statues of the saints look like paedos. The raucous laughter echoing up the nave, spilt beer trickling into the lettering of the memorial flagstones, while the comedian perches a buttock on the altar and goes into his bit about internet porn.
I’ve never liked those bars or clubs that exist in deconsecrated Victorian churches or chapels. It feels a bit sad, the spiritual hopes of the people who commissioned and built those dignified places dashed nightly, their confidence and piety made foolish by the passing of time, as punters drink or dance or rush to the new lean-to toilet block. They’re fine buildings whose congregations have long scattered, and so logically they should be used, but a part of me feels that demolition would be kinder to the memory of the long-dead worshippers who once filled them.
So is Ashenden right when he says that, by allowing David O’Doherty’s forthcoming gig, the Church of England has shown “spiritual illiteracy”? It’s a catchy phrase, no less than you’d expect from a media-savvy former cleric, though I’m not sure what it actually means. At first glance, it really feels like it means something insightful but then you look at it for a bit longer and no more meaning is forthcoming. I reckon it just means he thinks the church has done something bad and so he’s saying it in a vaguely religious and ecclesiastical way to suit the mood. It’s the same instinct that might cause someone to compliment a particularly delicious plate of haggis by putting on a comedy Scottish accent.
I feel I’m uniquely placed to opine on this issue because I actually performed at a comedy gig in a cathedral a week ago. Perhaps “performed” is putting it a bit strongly. I chatted. It was part of the Bristol Slapstick festival and I was interviewed about my favourite bits of slapstick from film and TV, in front of a big screen to show the clips, in Bristol Cathedral. My wife, who was in the audience, says she isn’t sure if there was a bar. But she said she really enjoyed the evening so I think there must have been.
I thought it was a lovely event: Bristol’s annual festival celebrating silent and physical comedy, having weathered the existential threat of lockdown, returning triumphantly to its audience of pratfall enthusiasts. And while its usual venue, the Bristol Beacon, is being refurbished, it was welcomed into the most ancient of the city’s indoor spaces, its medieval cathedral. It was a happy atmosphere, with vergers wearing the regalia of the cathedral mingling with festival volunteers in their slapstick-branded sweatshirts, everyone enthusiastic about the hundreds of people who were arriving, and anxious for the show to be a success. We ended the evening with a tribute to the wonderful Barry Cryer, who had died a couple of days earlier.
So was it “offensive to everyone who thinks a cathedral is a holy space”? I’m not very religious, but neither am I an atheist. I’m a “don’t know”. I hope there’s a nice big God, and I hope I find myself believing in one when I expire, but I don’t reckon thinking about it a lot is going to give me the answer. I like churches, though – I find them both calming and moving, a combination rarely achieved by TV drama. During the event, I was extremely pleased to be in a cathedral.
Would Ashenden say that was irrelevant because I’m not a practising Anglican? Presumably not because neither is he any more. Though formerly a priest of the Church of England, he has subsequently changed service provider and is now a Roman Catholic. He says he left the C of E because of its “capitulation to the increasingly intense and non-negotiable demands of a secular culture”.
I understand his frustration. Religion, many people think, is supposed to offer clarity: rules and salvation. Eternal and unchanging truths. The woolly and hand-wringing Church of England, the state religion of an increasingly irreligious state, coping with declining congregations and disintegrating architecture, might seem like a poor excuse for a belief system compared with its muscular and unwavering rivals. Far from converting people to its doctrines, it seems more concerned with accommodating the faithless.
Maybe that’s why I like it. To me, the troubled, thoughtful and well-meaning fogginess of the C of E feels much more truthful, a much more comprehensible and sane reflection of how the human condition feels, than all those more dynamic philosophies. Other religions may have retained the fiery naivety of youth, but the Anglican church has the mild and tolerant befuddlement of experience, which is the closest thing to wisdom that I’ll ever believe in.
And it has all these amazing buildings. Why not take as a starting point that people should be going inside them, for whatever reason? They should be part of our lives. They are beautiful and imbued with centuries of faith, but also of politics and compromise and hypocrisy. Bristol Cathedral was an abbey before Henry VIII took a shine to a younger woman. It’s a cathedral because of a midlife crisis. That doesn’t feel like an entirely inappropriate venue for comedy.
