There was some shock in the mainstream media this week at a report suggesting that God beat the final Ashes cricket test in the TV ratings last Sunday.
Perhaps God isn't 'dead' after all.
Well, to be more precise nearly half a million more people were watching BBC's long running Songs of Praise than SKY TV's cricket coverage at the same time.
The headline in the Australian said "England wins Ashes but God wins ratings".
It produced some surprise on Australian breakfast TV and in the Christian blogosphere. Although some of the commentators seemed not to realise the report was talking about UK TV viewers and not Australians.
While I'm sure this fact alone could make a nice sermon illustration, there is more to this story.
The UK press put the report into its proper context, explaining that viewer numbers have plummeted since the cricket went to pay TV.
The Guardian report had the most details:
The climax of England’s 2-1 series win over Australia at the Oval in south London was watched by 1.92 million viewers on Sky Sports 1, a 14% share of the multichannel audience, between 5.45pm and 6pm.
At its peak, Sky Sports 1’s live Ashes coverage had more viewers than Gardeners’ World on BBC2, which had 1.1 million viewers between 5.45pm and 6pm, and was neck and neck with a repeat of Agatha Christie’s Poirot on ITV1, which had 1.9 million viewers. But it could not better the 2.3 million viewers watching Songs of Praise on BBC1.
However, Sky’s audience was inevitably a fraction of the peak of 7.4 million viewers who saw England’s last Ashes triumph in 2005, which was available free-to-air on Channel 4.
Two thoughts:
1. Post-colonialism
I think the real 'sermon' in this story is the way commercial forces are tearing international cricket apart and treating its fans like mugs. More than any other professional sport, cricket is eating itself.
Furthermore, like Anglicanism, cricket is a child of the British Empire.
There are genuine parallels here between the break-up of the Anglican Communion and traditional cricket culture. The English power-brokers seem merely to muddle on in the face of the growing strength of the developing world (Africa and India respectively).
2. God and the mass TV market
It does shock me that an unashamedly Christian TV program can find that level of mass audience in the UK.
Songs of Praise is a clever mix of nostalgic music and human-interest testimony stories. Have local TV programmers missed a potential demographic by not attempting a local version?
Or are the Poms that different to Aussies, with Song of Praise tapping into a their national longing for the lost culture of the rural English village?
