Wot No Parables?
John's Gospel, M*A*S*H, Sesame Street and how I wrote the least watched episode of My Family.
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This column is taken from The Gospel According to A Sitcom Writer which was published by SPCK on 17th June.
The most famous wedding outside the Bible took place in 1981. Approximately 28.4 million people in the UK watched Prince Charles marry Lady Diana Spencer. Hundreds of millions watched globally.
A few months later, a fictional wedding drew an audience of 17.8 million viewers in the UK. On BBC1, Audrey fforbes-Hamilton (Penelope Keith) married Richard de Vere (Peter Bowles) in the finale of the smash-hit sitcom, To the Manor Born. The audience figures seem large when you look back, but there are two crucial factors people often miss.
The first is that, in 1981, if you wanted to change channel, you had to get off the sofa or despatch a child (usually the youngest, i.e. me). The TV remote control was still the stuff of science fiction. The second factor to remember is that there were only three channels.
But then, on 2 November 1982, Channel 4 began. And it seemed very different from the other three. A bit like John’s Gospel. But we’ll come to back that.
My love of sitcom
On its very first night, Channel 4 showed The Comic Strip Presents . . . Five Go Mad in Dorset, starring all the cool kids in comedy like French and Saunders, Adrian Edmondson and Robbie Coltrane. At first, Channel 4 didn’t have much success with homegrown sitcoms (e.g. Chelmsford 123), not least because it could import them from America. Therefore, I spent many happy hours of my life watching Roseanne and The Cosby Show, before graduating to Cheers, and M*A*S*H on BBC2, when I was allowed to stay up late enough. From an early age, I associated sitcom with smart speech and American accents. I was hooked. It set me on a path of wanting to emulate these shows.
Sadly, by the time I was writing TV sitcoms, I was working in a world with multi-channel, remote-controlled TVs in the age of Freeview and Sky TV. Audience figures reflected this fragmentation. This was made especially obvious when the episode of BBC1 mainstream mainstay, My Family, that I wrote was broadcast on 28 May 2004. It drew 4.4 million viewers. In my defence, it was up against the last ever episode of Friends on Channel 4, so I don’t take it too personally.
Back to the Gospel
I didn’t mind losing to Channel 4 that night. It was home to a childhood favourite, Sesame Street, which had just enough Muppets to keep it interesting. One regular feature from that show sticks in my mind and is relevant to our return to John’s Gospel. They would split the screen in four and show three kids doing something like bouncing a ball. In one section was another kid doing something else, like playing with a hula hoop. A catchy song played in which we were told that ‘Three of these kids belong together, three of these kids are kind of the same. But one of these kids is doing his own thing . . .’
In the New Testament, the kid who’s doing his own thing is John, the Gospel writer. You have the Synoptic Gospel writers, Matthew, Mark and Luke, who ‘belong together’ all merrily bouncing a ball. They overlap, use similar sources and consistently cover the same events, albeit from slightly different angles. (see pic above)
But John is out there hula-hooping, doing his own thing. Only in John’s Gospel does Jesus raise Lazarus from the dead, meet Nicodemus and the woman at the well, and wash the disciples’ feet. And don’t go looking for any exorcisms, transfigurations, ascensions, temptations in the wilderness or calls to repentance. In today’s parlance, you’d call John a reboot.
Wot, no parables?1
Another astonishing omission from John’s Gospel is parables. Parables there are none. No fictional Samaritans, prodigal sons tending pigs, or seeds falling on stony ground. Jesus makes heavy use of metaphors and allusion, and the I AM statements are essential. But there are no short stories that begin with, ‘A man went out early in the morning to hire la- bourers for his vineyard,’ or, ‘A man about to go on a journey summoned his stewards’. None of those. But it’s okay. I’ve written some.
And so I present The Parable of the Lost Key. You will notice that it is Peter telling the parable and not Jesus. A red line for me is having Jesus say things he did not say.2
I’m also drawn to Peter, who seems to channel the spirit of Homer Simpson in the Gospel accounts. Perhaps when the twelve or the seventy were sent out by Jesus (neither of which occur in John’s Gospel), Peter would plausibly try to retell or expand some of Jesus’ parables, but get it wrong in the process. You can read the results for yourself:
Early manuscripts do not include the following:
Now the tax collectors and ‘sinners’ were all gathering round Peter, but the Pharisees and teachers of the law muttered, ‘This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.’ Then Peter told them this parable.
‘Suppose one of you has a hundred keys and loses one. Does he not leave the 99 keys, shout loudly and say, “Where on earth did I put that key?”?
‘Will his wife not say to him, “Where did you last have it?”?
‘And will he not reply, “If I knew that I wouldn’t have lost it, would I?”?
‘And will she not say, “I was only trying to be helpful”?
‘And will he not say, “I know, I know. I’m sorry. It’s just this always happens”?
‘And will she not say, “Well, if you put them on that hook like I’m always telling you, then maybe . . . ”?
‘And will he not recall the proverbs of Solomon, which describe a nagging wife being like a leaking roof? And will he dare to say this?
‘And will she not remind him that there is a dripping tap that needs fixing that he said he’d get round to last weekend but hasn’t?
‘Then at last he finds the key in his other trousers.
‘Then he will call his friends and neighbours together, saying, “Rejoice with me; I found my lost key.”
‘And they will think he is a bit odd because it is only a key and hardly something worth gathering your friends and neighbours for, and they will shuffle out embarrassed and slightly afraid.
‘Truly, truly I say to you,’3 said Peter, ‘there will be more rejoicing over one lost key that has been found than there will ever be over a lost coin.’
And everyone looked at Peter.
‘Teacher,’ said one of the disciples, ‘where exactly is this going?’
And Peter replied, ‘Do you still not understand?’ And they said, ‘Do you?’
And he said, ‘No.’
This is not the word of the Lord.
Thanks be to God.
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If you’re 45 or older, you may remember an advertising campaign, ‘Wot, no meat?’ If you’re much older, you may remember Mr Chad, a cartoon figure of graffiti, commenting on shortages during rationing – e.g. ‘Wot, no sugar?’
I realize this is theologically problematic, as I believe Paul’s words in 2 Timothy 3.16 that ‘Every Scripture is God-breathed’, and therefore Jesus’ words as presented in the Bible aren’t technically any more or less authorita- tive than all the other words. For me, it’s all or nothing. In fact, for me, it’s all. Not nothing. For more discussion of this, listen to the latest edition of the Cooper and Cary Have Words podcast.
I put ‘Truly, truly I say to you’ to make it more John-like where Jesus uses that expression a lot.
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