All Revved Up With Somewhere To Go
Thursday 22nd July 2010
Rev's got me wondering. I've only chuckled a few times at each episode, there haven't been any laugh-out loud moments and I don't come away thinking, 'that was brilliant' like I do from 30 Rock or Frasier, but I'm tuning in each week. Although I'm not splitting my sides, I feel as though I've put on a comfy pair of slippers and had a chat with a new, inoffensive friend that I met at the local badminton club. The feelings that keep coming back to me are pleasant, reassuring and most of all... trustworthy.
On its release, there were inevitable comparisons between Tom Hollander's Rev Adam Smallbone and Dawn French's Rev Geraldine Granger (but why not Father Ted, or anything with Derek Nimmo in it?). But Adam (and thank the Lord they didn't call his wife, played by the as-ever-faultless Olivia Colman, Eve) isn't paving new ways for womankind, he's tapped in quite nicely to the feeling that a lot of us are suffering in a post-class-system world - that everybody else has done ok and we haven't and we have no-one to blame but ourselves.
The great thing about Rev is that it deals with this deep, fundamental and gnarling fear that we're never going to be good enough. Adam's life is filled with such basic insecurity that even a successful, tolerant and beautiful wife and a connection to his creator aren't enough to make a mark on the bottomless pit of uncertainty and feeling of failure that his congregation of losers reinforces every day. Adam, the first man, is also the worst man - the prototype, vicar 1.0, a trial version whose weaknesses are exposed each week by the superior versions that threaten his world and will inevitably render him obsolete.
The only thing that's keeping him in the job is his utter humanity. He fails at being successful in the public eye, media savvy or famous, the benchmarks that have replaced social class as proof of existence in the western world. So we want him to score the victories of humanity - forgiveness, connection, humility - to help us put those traits in their rightful place at the top of society's virtuous pyramid.
With the action centred around Adam, I want to know more about his wife, Alex. While she's not underwritten, she's certainly unexplored, and I'd be interested to know what really drives this saint of a woman who puts up with the tea leaves and final slurps of society knocking on her door at all hours to beg favours from the vicar and, more than anything, suffers Adam with an ever-encouraging smile on her face like a mother with a five-year-old.
So it's with a sense of irony that I can trust Rev to give me an inner smile, not a toothy grin or a beaming glow, but a warm 'n fuzzy like a September Sunday afternoon with long shadows at tea time. If the first commandment of any sustainable relationship is trust, then I trust Smallbone's untrustworthiness.