One star out of five
According to the most recent census, nearly half of adults in England and Wales still identify as Christian.
Which makes it all the more striking that the BBC — the public broadcaster charged with speaking to and for the country — appears, in The Rapture, to treat Christianity as little more than a haven for conspiracy-minded zealots and anti-science extremists.
Sam Hazeldine stars as Leonard Krall, a slick, unsettling evangelist with the polished menace of an American megachurch preacher, building a devoted flock by urging people to pray to a “higher power” and to “come together in hope”.
The drama wastes no time signalling that Krall is bad news. He refers to “the so-called climate crisis” and tells his listeners: “They want to keep us in a doom loop. We can’t just enjoy the sunshine. Apparently, we have to fear it.”
In the BBC’s moral universe, apparently, there is no graver offence. Krall’s teenage daughter, Bethany, played by India Ria Amarteifio, is meanwhile confined to a psychiatric hospital after allegedly killing her mother with a screwdriver.
Bethany insists she is innocent, though she hardly helps her case by acting like an exaggerated sketch of the worst kind of smug, hostile teenager. She is also plagued by visions of what is to come, many of them steeped in Biblical apocalypse, Armageddon imagery and End of Days dread.
One image she obsessively sketches shows Christ with half of his face ripped away. And, sure enough, that vision is realised when a freak storm destroys the 90ft statue of Jesus overlooking Lisbon, the Santuario de Cristo Rei.
Would the Beeb make a similar drama about a Muslim imam, whose mentally ill daughter drew nightmarish images inspired by the Koran? Would it use CGI to imagine the destruction of an Islamic holy monument?
Pictured: Iwan Rheon as Dick Carwyn and Ruth Madeley as Gabriele Fox in the BBC’s The Rapture
Rhetorical questions, of course. There’d be mobs on the streets.
In any case, no agent would ever ask an actor to appear in such a TV show. Can you imagine the phone call? ‘Darling, I think I’ve found a lovely role for you in this new telly thing about Islam. Umm . . . how do you feel about spending the rest of your life in hiding?’
Fortunately for the cast of The Rapture, it isn’t blasphemy to make shoddy, unconvincing conspiracy dramas, though this five-part series won’t add lustre to anyone’s CVs.
Ruth Madeley plays Dr Gabrielle Fox, a clinical psychologist returning to work after a car crash that killed her husband and left her a paraplegic. Bethany is one of her patients, and naturally the good doctor takes it upon herself to seek out new evidence.
I’m not sure why she’s bothering — security at the hospital is so lax that Bethany is able to assault Gabrielle, steal a weapon and, later, escape into the grounds while the staff are distracted by their mobile phones.
The continuity between shots is equally wayward. Iwan Rheon plays a drunken journalist who, in three consecutive shots, is seen clutching a glass of red, then a notebook, then a glass of white. I blame global warming.
Bad luck of the weekend:
Two cheetahs braved a flooded river, in the climate change documentary Force Of Nature (ITV1), and made it across alive despite marauding crocs. Then one of them ran slap into a fatal lion ambush. Some days, things just won’t go right.
