  |
|
|
|
Happy Birthday, Songs of Praise - Page 2© Allan Lee
The programme has been made in some unlikely places in the UK and abroad – during the time I worked there, it visited St Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, beaches on the Costa del Sol in Spain, hotels in the Caribbean, the Judean desert outside Jerusalem, a Kurdish refugee camp on the Turkish border, and the ghettos of Rio de Janeiro. It has brought together Catholic and Protestant communities during the troubles in Northern Ireland; and it has re-united soldiers serving during the Gulf War with their families back home.
But the reason Songs of Praise has lasted so long is not because of its hard working staff, its high production values, its quality musical content or its regular time slot. The real stars of the programme are the people who are interviewed, who tell their own stories about their own lives in their own words. These are not people who are on TV because they are ‘celebrities’ or because it’s their turn to have their ten second soundbite of fame on a news bulletin. These are REAL people, ordinary people who tell stories of the often extraordinary things which they have faced. The other things are important, but it’s the people who make Songs of Praise stand out from the crowd. The music, of course, is important, too. There is something spine-tingling about hearing a choir of more than a thousand people singing one of the great hymns of the last four hundred years, giving it all they’ve got. Like most of the production team, from time to time I was occasionally pressed into service to swell the numbers among the tenors (or wherever there was a shortage!) and there is nothing quite as exciting as singing under those circumstances. Although Songs of Praise is part of the BBC’s Sunday evening schedule furniture, with which generations of people have grown up, it should be remembered it’s also a pioneering department. Its staff has always had a ‘can do’ ethos as they beavered away to produce their programmes. Songs of Praise was the first BBC programme produced regularly in stereo. It experimented with High Definition TV and with the ‘letterbox’ format years before other programmes had even thought of it. It’s mounted complex three-site outside broadcasts in three different countries linked by satellite when other departments thought the producers were mad. It’s never been complacent, or taken its continuing popularity for granted.
The copyright of the article Happy Birthday, Songs of Praise - Page 2 in Broadcasting is owned by Allan Lee. Permission to republish Happy Birthday, Songs of Praise - Page 2 in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
|
|
|
|
