An Island Parish – Broadening the Focus?

One of the big downsides as a parish priest of appearing on a programme like Island Parish is the attention and extra pressure it brings – Rev Jamie Allen resigned following his appearance in A Country Parish (although he didn’t leave the priesthood and is now at another parish) and Seaside Parish noticeably shifted focus onto the Bishop of Truro later on, after Rev Christine Musser started getting hate mail.

Watching the final part of this series of Island Parish I started to wonder whether Rev Guy was experiencing the same level of pressure.

The series was filmed over the whole of 2007, and Rev Guy featured quite heavily in the early episodes, but as the series wore on, and in particular he started to run into pastoral problems with some of his parishioners he noticeably featured less. My thought is that if, alongside the pastoral problems he was also dealing with a large volume of mail from viewers it may be making a difficult situation worse, so maybe the decision has been taken to try to lessen his involvement and allow him to actually do his job.

Then last week, Rev David Easton, the Methodist Minister suddenly featured after being pretty well ignored up to then. I thought that might have been just for the baptism story, but this week there was a lot more of him, including pointing towards a storyline for next year as his posting to the islands comes up for renewal during 2008. Interestingly although Rev Guy briefly appeared, and turned up in the final group shot, it was Rev David who did the summing up voice-over. Certainly after that I’m expecting to see a lot more of the Methodists come next year, and hopefully showing more than one priest will help lessen the inevitable pressure the priests shown will receive.

One thought on “An Island Parish – Broadening the Focus?”

  1. I happen to know that although christine musser and jamie allen recieved many letters from viewers, overwhelmingly positive, father guy did not.

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