C4 Religion Commissioner Aaqil Ahmed has won awards and made waves in equal measure with his challenging and populist programmes on religion. I went to see him in Horseferry Road to get his views on whether the Bible really has any place on TV.
Is religion a personal passion of yours?
It’s definitely of interest. I grew up in a practising Muslim family and I am still Muslim, as much as I can be one myself. But this job wasn’t what I started out to do. I think what makes it easier for me to do this job is that I had a career before I worked in religious programmes. That’s the difference. I don’t think you have to be necessarily an expert, but I think that whatever job you do, you have to really care about it. If you’re doing it because it’s just the latest gig, you’re never going to do it correctly. Whether it’s religion, sport, drama, crime; whenever you do a job, you’ve got to really dive into it head first and learn as much as you can. And sometimes that makes you the font of knowledge on all sorts of different subjects.
What has surprised you as you’ve delved deeper into the world of religion?
At Channel 4 we tend to focus - more than anybody else does in British television - on religion, not just in worship but on how it impacts on our daily life. We look at different kinds of religion and put it in prime time. There have been so many subjects we’ve tackled. I’ve spent a lot of time in the Middle East because of this job, as well as in America and in Britain. I’ve learned much more about Christianity and Judaism. And I’ve learned how difficult it is to get the non-Abrahamic faiths into our output. I’ve had to get that knowledge base myself, to try and squeeze those kinds of religions and those kind of subject areas into a format that will work for our audience.
Are audiences interested in the Bible?
I think as a general rule, there is an audience for the Bible. What you really have to ask yourself is ‘what is your particular audience’. There’s a BBC1 audience for the Bible, and for worship. There isn’t a Channel 4 audience for worship that would be any different. Our audience is quite young and quite upmarket. What they’re after is very different from the audience for other channels. Our audience is interested in the Bible, of course, but possibly interested in what the Bible is telling us about today – what it means for them. They’re not necessarily the kind of audience that is already au fait with – or interested that much in - the Bible. They’re not going to Bible studies, or going to church. We have to think of programmes that will engage our audience, which are a very different set of viewers to what you would expect on BBC1.
Do you think the Bible has got anything to say to viewers?
Our viewership is diverse. It’s a young audience, but not necessarily teenage. In terms of programmes, we’ve done Who Wrote The Bible?, Secret Family of Jesus, Hidden Story of Jesus, Secrets of the Twelve Disciples, as well as subjects on Evangelical Christianity or people training to be preachers. All of these things have stories from the Bible within them. All of them have had different kinds of approaches, in terms of what our audience would like to have. As a general rule, our audience is quite inquisitive. For instance, the programmes that we’ve shown on Christmas Day are probably not aimed at a Christian kind of audience who would obviously know most of that stuff.
They’re actually aimed at an inquisitive audience and we’ve managed to get between 1 and 1.5 million people on Channel 4, on Christmas Day - or on Easter Sunday - engaging with a film about theology, in prime time. That’s a lot of people who aren’t necessarily that bothered. To bring them to that subject is actually far more useful than just churning out a whole series of programmes that are aimed at the converted - who already know the story.
Can programming run the risk of dismissing sacred texts?
We’d never ridicule anybody’s sacred text, that’s quite important. But what we are seeing is the fact that for our audience, sacred texts are there to be looked at. We’ve just done the first film on the Qur’an. It’s nowhere near as in-depth as you’d expect a film to be on the Bible, but that’s because it’s the first ever film on the Qur’an. And there’ve only been a handful of Western-based people studying its authenticity. In terms of the Bible, people may say, ‘your films tend to focus on whether the Bible is true or not’. That’s just because there are lots of stories involved in the Bible that there have been lots of academic or archaeological studies on and also, it fits into a current kind of interest. I’d say surely it’s better that we get more people watching these programmes who learn a bit more of the stories of the Bible than just to preach the converted.
Do you see a relationship between the Bible and the Qur’an?
Talking as a Muslim rather than a film-maker, there is definitely a reverence for the Bible, in terms of both the Old Testament and New Testament. Obviously, there’s a difference of opinion over the divinity of Jesus. For Christianity, Islam has no role to play within their belief structure, and I think that’s fair enough. But in terms of programme-making as a commissioner, there’s something to be picked up on there.
For instance, when we did the Hidden Story of Jesus, we looked at Jesus stories within other faiths, and we told – as much as we could do in that period of time – the story of Jesus in Islam. So there is an opportunity to tell that kind of story. There may be some people who would say ‘how could you tell the story of Jesus in Islam if you’re doing a programme on the Bible?’. Well, there are more mentions of Jesus in the Qur’an than there are of Mohammed. It was the same thing in the Qur’an film. We mentioned the story of Jesus and Mary, to explain that the Old Testament and Jesus are both within the Qur’an. To have not done that would have been quite foolish and we felt it was important to do it in the current climate.
Do you think the Bible has any significance for our culture today?
I think it does. The Bible is really important to Western society and certainly to British society. If you look at a lot of the words and phrases that we use (such as ‘salt of the earth’), much of it comes from when the Bible was written in English. If you say, ‘does the average person sat in a pub in Bolton or wherever have any idea about that?’. Well, they don’t realise but to the society around them, it’s important.
Is it the Bible? Is it the Church? Is it the Establishment? I don’t know. You can’t really separate all of that. The very fabric of British society is underpinned by that belief structure in the Bible and in Westernised Christianity. Christianity is a Middle-Eastern religion that was Westernised in Europe. If people say that the Bible and Christianity – I say the two things are together - have no place in society today, then I say that you don’t have the society that we live in. This country wouldn’t exist as it is without the Bible and Christianity.
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