By Aaqil Ahmed,Commissioning Editor for Religion and Multicultural at Channel 4
Christianity: A History is the biggest project I have commissioned during my time at Channel 4. It’s almost unheard of for a mainstream broadcaster to dedicate eight hours of prime time television to Christianity in this way. I think it’s fair to say that it’s a big risk, but a risk I really wanted to take.
About a year ago, both the head of C4 and I talked about ways of making the channel’s religious output feel special and stand out from the norm. The best way forward, I felt, was to bunch things together and make big statement projects, creating 'must watch' moments - the kind of projects you just don’t see anywhere else. The first project in this new era featured both The Qur’an and The Seven Wonders of the Muslim World. Broadcast during one week in July 2008, these programmes really stood out and felt extremely relevant.
At the same time, I started to plan the next big project. A few production companies tried to sell a number of ideas but one idea stood out for me: Pioneer Productions wanted to tell the history of Christianity from an alternative perspective, and with particular relevance to Britain. It was an intriguing idea and felt like an exact fit to what I was looking for.
This project has been a mammoth undertaking for the producers: eight programmes, eight different presenters, multiple locations and continents, numerous directors, eight individual programme consultants, various lawyers, agents… and of course they had to deal with me! The end result of all this hard work is a series I am very proud of. Christianity: A History demonstrates just how seriously we take the subject of religion at Channel 4, and I believe it is exactly the sort of grown up and inquisitive programming our audience both asks for and deserves.
As with all religions, the history of Christianity is not a simple one. It contains dark moments, compromises and great achievements, and features life-changing heroes and villains. I feel that now is the right time for Channel 4 to present these stories in a way that will inform our audience about how this faith has shaped our world, and more specifically, our nation. I’m not making such a grand statement for the sake of it, but rather to demonstrate an acceptance that we cannot understand our world today without realising how it was shaped.
Two examples of Christianity’s impact on the modern world are the Reformation and the Crusades. Without the Reformation we may not have become a Protestant nation with many of the characteristics, language and structures we take for granted today. And the Crusades? One of our presenters, Rageh Omar, argues in his film that we’ve forgotten its importance in the west, but that in the Muslim world, the brutality of the Crusades still resonates in the hearts of many Muslims and in the rhetoric of Al Qaeda.
So, Christianity: A History is not just history - it’s a lesson about today and an attempt to shed light on the history of a faith that continues to shape the destiny of all of us in some way or other. I hope it does that and that enough viewers get something from it. I don’t expect everyone to love it, but I expect it to make most viewers think, which can’t be a bad thing can it?
What are your thoughts?
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