Reverend Richard Coles at Farnham Literary Festival 2025

Tindle News

He’s Britain’s most famous vicar, a finalist in I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out of Here, former member of the pop band The Communards, Radio 4 presenter and Sunday Times best-selling author of the Canon Clement novels: and on Saturday, March 8, 2025 the Reverend Richard Coles was at Farnham Literary Festival. As well as surviving the jungle, he has won Christmas Masterchef, Celebrity Mastermind twice, been a contestant on Strictly Come Dancing and captained Leeds to victory in Christmas University Challenge in 2019, so there was plenty to talk about! He was in conversation with novelist Jack Jewers.

Transcript

00:00There were a few things about London in 1980 that were really formative for me. The first

00:26was that it was accessible to the young and the poor. You could arrive in London, you

00:30could find yourself some kind of foothold, a squat, a hard-to-let council flat in what

00:37we now call Zone 1, imagine that, or a cheap rental, imagine that. So you could find it

00:43and you could sort of sign on or get a job in a bar or something like that. But also

00:48it was where in Liverpool, if you were in, I grew up in Kettering, and no disrespect

00:53to Kettering, but when I realised I was gay as a teenager, I didn't think that a life

01:01rich in opportunity would lie close to hand. In the 1980s, if you were a gay man in a big

01:07city, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times. So it was a very moment where

01:11we kind of broke through and all of a sudden that little life began to blossom. HIV arrived

01:17and that changed all our lives. And I think there are lots of people who have a confrontation

01:24with mortality on that scale, when they ask to see some of the monuments of the church

01:29and so many of them are men in their 20s who didn't get past 1918. Imagine what that did

01:35to people. And it was for us, when we were very aged, very selective and people were

01:41used to rec. It was that sort of experience and I think, essentially there are two big

01:46spikes in locations in the church of England. One was 1919 and one was 1946. There's people

01:54coming down from conflict, coming in through all that, and all of a sudden places like

01:59this make sense to them. And that's what happened to me, it was in the sort of throes of that,

02:03in the grip of that. I remember, I mean I was a chorister when I was a kid, but I didn't

02:08believe it at all. I liked it, I loved the music, I liked being in church, I liked the

02:12people, but I thought it was all nonsense, a fairytale, that no one in their right mind

02:17could live by it. But I liked being in the church, I liked the atmosphere. Like lots

02:25of people I think I sensed, rather than understood, that these are uniquely distinctive places

02:31and stuff can fit there and resonate there in a way that doesn't go anywhere else. You

02:35get that in churches, but I went down to Nile in Egypt last year and I went to the temple

02:41of Seti, which hadn't been used for its religious purpose for another 4,000 years, but it still

02:47felt like that sort of thing. And I wanted to commit with it again. So I did that, I

02:52went to church one morning and walked through the door very reluctantly, as a sceptic and

02:57an outsider, and they came out a participant. It was that, it was really an intense moment

03:03of conviction.

03:09The minute I got through the door, the minute I found my feet in it, it began to come into

03:13focus, but I didn't want to be a bicker. I knew I needed to, I think like lots of people

03:18I thought I knew what Christianity was, but the Christianity I thought I knew was what

03:24I had experienced when I was a kid. I stopped thinking about it the moment it ceased to

03:28be compulsory. And then when I went in the door again, I realised that there was a bit

03:33more to it than I needed to do. So I went to university. I was 30, hadn't been to university.

03:38So I went to do, this is odd because today I've retraced the steps, I've been to my old

03:42college today. And I did a theology degree and that was wonderful. Fantastic course and

03:49I really enjoyed the intellectual stimulation and I was very, very active in church at that

03:57time. And of course what came into focus was the sense that God might have a plan. But

04:03I didn't want to get ordained so I did the next best thing to get ordained in a church

04:07meeting and I went to work for BBC Radio, which is pretty much like a church radio.

04:12A different kind of church, right? Do you know I was in the arts unit at the BBC and

04:1625% of the people in the arts unit were makerage kids. In a hostile church world back in the

04:211980s where people were very hostile to gay and lesbian people. Well, easily in the sense

04:28that only God didn't have a problem. So I've never felt that for a second that God had

04:32a problem. So I was sorted in a very fundamental way about that. Also I found that most people

04:39are fine actually and if they maybe have a reservation, often getting to know people,

04:45dispels any anxieties about that. I would say that it's probably a more hostile environment

04:50now than it was in 1989. In most places, most churches, in places like Parliament, because

04:57you know everyone's got kids or colleagues or neighbours who are whatever LGBT or whatever

05:04lexicon is, you know? And so we're all used to that and it gets on with our lives. But

05:09for people who find that difficult for reasons of doctrine, that's a very, very tough argument

05:17at the moment. I've never known it in fact quite so bitter as it is now and we're in

05:22the middle of trying to work out that balance. It doesn't just, I mean sometimes I discourage

05:27it but I would worry more if we didn't argue because if we're arguing it means we're taking

05:33it seriously and I don't really think we need to take it seriously. There's a lot more in

05:38the world, right? And I'm very conscious at the moment that I think we've perhaps been

05:46complacent. I can clearly think about what happened in 1962 in Britain. I had a fantastic

05:52education, I went to an independent school. I've had a fantastic education since then

05:59which I had to pay for. Taxpayers paid for it. And I've lived in a world where people

06:04have got richer, where we've been stable and secure and prosperous and most of us have

06:09been healthy and I've started to think that maybe that's just normal and it's not. That's

06:14not representative of most people's lives and experience. Perhaps what's happening at

06:18the moment is an adjustment to understanding that the world is very divided. It's full

06:24of centrifugal force at the moment, it feels like an arm that's happening everywhere. If

06:28you put your head into the hellscape of social media for too long you'll find it out. So

06:35I think it is good to be woken up out of a slumber of complacency. This is my positive

06:43spin.

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