Grantchester BBC TV series

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Has anyone seen the BBC series Grantchester? It’s about a Church of England priest in the '50s, who helps the local police detective solve crimes like Father Brown.
I enjoy it, though some of the differences between the churches seem strange, although I used to be an Episcopalian. They do a lot of smoking and drinking, and the priest spends a lot of his time struggling with his love for a married woman. . But he does give good homilies.
I can’t imagine where he finds all the time to solve mysteries, but I guess we could say the same about Father Brown.
Any one else seen it?
 
My wife and I really enjoy the series, but I fear for different reasons. I like the characters and plot lines, but I have a sneaky suspicion my wife watches just to dreamily stare at James Norton 😍. Honestly, the man looks like Robert Redford and Brad Pitt had a love child.
 
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humbleseeker said:
My wife and I really enjoy the series, but I fear for different reasons. I like the characters and plot lines, but I have a sneaky suspicion my wife watches just to dreamily stare at James Norton 😍. Honestly, the man looks like Robert Redford and Brad Pitt had a love child.
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Goodness, I’m going to have to check this out! 😁
 
We used to; but when Gordy (The cop?) started sleeping with the secretary it was just too much. I just didnt’ want to see the fallout from that.

We like Father Brown alot better. Though he’s definitely not exactly orthodox, he generally is lighter and more fun.
 
Yes I’ve watched it. I like the police side of things as well.
 
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The dude is cute, but I prefer the detective – his face has character. I’m sorry to hear the series slips into unnecessary worldliness.
 
Thought it was BBC because set in England, I assume.
It got pretty unbelievable near the end – who writes a resignation letter with no intention of mailing it? And how is leaving a single mother in the lurch, serving God? And there’s a lot of smiling around the nice curate finding a nice boyfriend.
You can see why they couldn’t use a Catholic priest. It makes me sad for the Church of England.
It’s still fun to watch.
 
Yes, I loved it except for all the SJW stuff. Too much of that going on in the 1950s to be realistic (IMO).
 
Londoner said:
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Viki63:
They do a lot of smoking and drinking
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I think that was pretty much the norm for British people in the 1950s.
Loud-living-dogma said:
all the SJW stuff
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You mean such as having a black archdeacon?! I did once look up when the Church of England appointed it’s first black archdeacon, and I can’t remember when it was now, but it was a long time after the 1950s.
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I mean how there is a gay curate, how they hang out with their black friends, how they help the young gay guy who is accused of murder. That’s a lot of diversity for small town England in the early 1950s IMO.
 
Loud-living-dogma said:
I mean how there is a gay curate
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I’ve never really watched it. I’ve just seen glimpses of the black archdeacon. Out of curiosity, is the gay curate in an Anglo-Catholic parish? I suspect that gay clergy were not particularly uncommon, especially among the Anglo-Catholic wing of the Church, but in the 1950s they would of course have kept any activities very quiet on account of its still being illegal.
 
He just seems a little daring. He meets up with a guy for dates at the movies, etc. Furtively, but he still goes.
 
Maybe I need to see this series to see what’s going on! From what you say, it sounds like some of the features of the series are not in themselves entirely implausible, but that the way they are all being brought together is something of a stretch.

For example, Anglican clergy, especially from the Anglo-Catholic wing of the Church, were often at the forefront of race relations. In the 1950s there were definitely Anglican clergy active, and very prominent, in the fight against apartheid in South Africa. At the same time, on the other hand, black immigrants in the UK found a rather mixed reception in parishes. I believe that they found a warm welcome in Anglo-Catholic parishes in the poorest areas of major cities, but many parishes were less welcoming. So while I think it’s entirely plausible that there were Anglican clergy in the 1950s who were far from being racist, it is somewhat unlikely that they were routinely socialising with black people, and in rural East Anglia there simply would not have been that many black people anyway!

Again, there’s been a gay subculture within the Anglo-Catholic movement ever since its inception in the 19th century, so a gay curate in an Anglican parish seems far from unlikely. What does seem unlikely is that he would be meeting other gay men for dates at the cinema. All male homosexuals were vulnerable to blackmail as well as to prosecution, and that would have been all the more of a risk for a clergyman.

I think there’s a tendency in all TV these days to try to introduce as many social issues as possible. You’ll see much the same trend in Call the Midwife. I caught bits of an episode the other day and there was a woman who has just discovered that she is intersex, another woman had an illegal abortion, there was a couple dealing with racism arising from the woman’s decision to marry a Sikh immigrant from India, and a man was suffering Couvade syndrome. A couple of weeks back an elderly woman was revisiting the trauma of force-feeding while imprisoned for campaigning for women’s suffrage. Although these things do happen in real life, it seems that in TV there is an implausibly high concentration of these issues! It can be done well and it can be done badly. Coronation Street does it much better. The issues are developed over a longer period and are woven into regular storylines with a lighter touch.
 
That’s exactly it – it just seemed that for a while, it was one episode after another that featured a storyline like that.
It is a fun show to watch though, and the pastor is quite good-looking and fun to watch. I’ve only watched the first couple of seasons so far.
 
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