Wednesday 12 May 2010

Dear producers of 'Lewis'...

... I want you to know that you can do whatever creative things you like with Oxford geography. It gives me great pleasure every week to see what you come up with. I love it when the characters drive down blocked-off roads or park in illegal places or turn the corner in one college and end up in a different one; that's all fun. But, contrary to what you attempted to make me believe this week, devoutly Catholic teenage boys do not wear t-shirts with pictures of the Virgin Mary on them. Nor do they wear rosaries as necklaces! Never, never, never.

Never.

Also, it's been two weeks in a row now: you've shown Catholic priests pottering around in pretty, medieval churches. Catholic churches in England are hardly ever medieval. You see, there was this thing called the Reformation, and all the photogenic pretty churches now belong to the Church of England. If you want to show a Catholic church or chapel, it will probably have been designed in the 1960s; it can be Victorian at the very earliest, but no earlier. If you show me a Catholic priest hearing confessions in a medieval church with a lych-gate by the village green, I will wonder what alternative reality you're living in.

Because I would like to live in it, too, please.

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