Money, sex, power and faith

Just four weeks ago the TV schedules were going through a very dull patch. But come the new year and we begin a golden age of new programmes and new schedules, far too many to review all in one week.

Top spot for me went to?Stonehouse?(ITV1), which??over three evenings told the incredible story of a Labour Member of Parliament who tried to fake his own death in order to start a new life with his secretary and mistress.

I well remember trudging the streets of Walsall on Thursday 4th?November 1976, trying to get people to vote Labour to replace an MP who, by then, was behind bars. For many years afterwards, the name Stonehouse was used in the Black Country as shorthand for a dysfunctional Labour Party which had lost its sense of purpose.?

John Stonehouse came from a solidly Labour family. His parents were trade unionists; both he and his mother, Rosina, served many years on Southampton City Council, with her becoming Lord Mayor. As a child, Stonehouse was in the Woodcraft Folk, the co-operative movement’s youth wing.

However, like several of my political colleagues over the years, he found the temptation of adultery and money too attractive. Politics can provide the means, motive and opportunity to destroy marriages. We first saw him compromised by a Czech secret service agent. His long-suffering wife made it clear that she knew he had enjoyed several affairs but her priority was to keep the family together.?

Financially, he was out to feather his own nest, taking bribes from the Czechs for very low level intelligence. Eventually it all closed in on him and he schemed with his mistress to take his own life and start again in Australia.

If Harold Wilson’s government had had a secure majority, Stonehouse’s disappearance, reappearance and disgrace would have simply been one of those affairs which added to the “gaiety of the nation” and soon forgotten. Wilson’s political tightrope blew it out of proportion.?

Those closest to Stonehouse suffered the most, with one of his children and a nephew subsequently writing books in his defence. Both his wife and his mistress faced the loss of a man they clearly loved. A sad ending for a man from a family of such high ideals (warning: there is some brief female nudity).

Call the Midwife?(BBC1) is now back for its twelfth series and has reached Poplar in 1968. It offers a real contrast to the world of politics. The tale of a faith-based midwifery service housed in an urban convent will always bring forward some dramatic and heart-warming stories but the latest series starts with a bitter twist. We are used to the programme portraying caring nuns, doctors and midwives helping a poor Cockney community to pull together, without many bad or malevolent people about.

All that changed one Saturday in April 1968 when a Conservative shadow cabinet member, Enoch Powell, predicted “rivers of blood” as a result of Commonwealth immigration. I remember joining a counter demonstration to the one called by dockworkers in support of Powell. It was an unpleasant time, but we seemed to get over it. However, in the last few years I have learnt from Black and Asian friends how threatened they felt at the time and for several years afterwards.

The latest series also has a thread on the problems a lesbian couple faced as they weaved the lies??they believed would protect them from scrutiny and discrimination. We may have a variety of views on same sex marriage, but the recognition that not every couple fits into the binary heterosexual box, is only now being recognised.?

Despite occasionally portraying faith as verging on the eccentric,?Call the Midwife?takes a positive view of Christianity and is a reassuring celebration of women empowering one another.

The nuns in Poplar were part of a movement which reached its peak in the 1960s. Irish journalist Olivia O’Leary was at a convent school in that decade and didn’t realise at the time that she was living through the last years of an Ireland firmly in the grip of Catholicism. In?The Essay: Behind the Veil – the Story of Irish Nuns?(Radio 3),?O’Leary tells how there were 18,000 nuns in Ireland in the 1960s with a further 3,000 serving overseas. Virtually every family had provided a nun for service to the church. Their watchwords were chastity, poverty and obedience and there are harrowing accounts of their training, and if chosen, sometimes, their departures. Numbers have now fallen drastically, with just a few thousand elderly nuns left, and convents being knocked down for housing or re-designated for community use.?

The decline in “the religious life” has been felt in the UK as well. Despite the disruption following the Henrician Reformation, convents and monasteries have flourished during the last 150 years, often providing retreat and rehabilitation for many of us who would otherwise have little to do with Catholicism and it’s Anglican variations.?Beyond Belief: Out of the Habit?(Radio 4) picks up the decline in the religious houses and follows the story of Lisa who left her convent home of 24 years, within a few days of meeting a monk with whom she “clicked”.?

Meanwhile?Digging for Britain?(BBC 2) is back. Just relax, let the young archeology students do the heavy lifting and marvel at the history they find beneath our feet.?