When the BBC commissioned the independent Tiger Aspect production company to make a three-part series about life in a monastery, they took the concept of reality TV to a new level.
Here was an opportunity to see if spirituality could be seen and experienced by ‘normal’ people from the outside world. Would the monks’ way of life and belief system affect those who took part in the project? Or would they confirm to a mass audience that religion is antiquated and irrelevant for a modern world? Put simply, could these monks prove to the five non-Catholics who came to live with them that their God was real enough to have faith in?
The Abbott of Worth Monastery, Father Christopher Jamison, made it clear that he believed the monks offered ‘an answer to dissatisfaction with life’ in an age of materialism and consumerism. The narrator picked up this theme and suggested that there was ‘something of deep value’ to be found in this ‘ancient vision of mankind in the world’. The question was whether this ‘vision’ had anything of value for today’s modern men.
