In Depth:  David Porter

Peter Ackroyd, stomping tie-less and overcoated round London, doesn't look like a great writer - and he certainly doesn't look like a TV presenter as he declaims his eloquent, resonant script. Yet one quickly falls under the spell of his BBC series 'London'. Both writer and presenter, he sounds much less stilted off-camera. But here he is celebrating his lifetime passion, and the heightened speech seems no less than appropriate.

The series was based on Ackroyd's 800-page 'London: the Biography', where his approach is by topic rather than chronology: London is for him a living organism. Shakespeare and his theatres, for example, get only passing attention, but there's a whole chapter on 'London as theatre'. Always, past and present co-exist - the TV series juxtaposed chilling TV recreations of the Gordon Riots with modern demonstrations in Trafalgar Square.

'Presence: Images of Christ for the Third Millennium'

Linked exhibitions in six cathedrals to celebrate 150 years of BibleLand's ministry. Remaining exhibitions: Lincoln, April 27 to June 4; Durham, July 31 to September 5. There is no separate entrance charge for the exhibitions. Further details from: www.biblelands.org.uk

It's a story that takes various forms, but here's the one I like.

In the 1960s the great theologian Karl Barth, at the end of his career, made a farewell tour of America where he was heard by huge audiences in the nation's leading universities. After one lecture, a student stood up and asked the world-famous theologian, 'Dr Barth, you have written a great deal on every aspect of theology and church history. Can you sum it all up in just a short sentence or two?'

Somebody's going to have to help me out on this, but I think that the author of a small book I used to own, called Danger, Saints at Work, was Tom Rees. While we're sorting the bibliographic details out, I'm glad to acknowledge its robust contribution to my Christian growth. It put its finger on some of the failings that beset Evangelicals, and did it with grace and a lot of humour. My copy has long since disappeared, but I remember it with affection. I hope I learned from it as its author intended.

Its comments on evangelical jargon, in particular, were joyfully received by those of us youngsters who had for years collected gems from the pulpit like: 'We pray for those who are sick of this church' (I think Mr Rees's version was 'We pray for those who are laid aside on beds of sickness' - equally good value for whiling away a slow service, if you were not very old but were old enough to spot a howler when you saw one). My church was particularly good at this kind of thing. Who could ever forget the report of the youth group singing hymns at the local hospital - where 'Every bed was almost full'? Or the moving account of the crematorium gardens ('I have rarely seen gardens so beautifully laid out' - well, you have to have a northern England upbringing to get the full flavour of it ...)?

The memory of John Bunyan the Tinker is surrounded by myths, not least the myth of his uniqueness. The old romantic picture of a largely unlearned man, locked in solitary durance vile and managing to produce an imperishable masterpiece of literature, is true only in one respect: The Pilgrim's Progress is indeed a masterpiece.

In fact, Bunyan wrote five great books. Only read the rest of Bunyan's works if you have an urgent interest in the theology or politics of the period. There are gems there, but they generally blush unseen.

I live next door to L'Abri Fellowship, the work founded by Francis and Edith Schaeffer in Switzerland and now active throughout the world; a number of L'Abri staff have contributed to the pages of Evangelicals Now over the years. Recently, L'Abri invited a professional artist, Janice Harding, to be artist-in-residence for most of a year.

For L'Abri, which has for decades been a place where the arts and the whole of modern culture have always been brought within the ambit of Christian experience and biblical apologetics, it was a logical extension of its ministry. And of course the presence of a real live artist on the premises led to a variety of teaching and discussion opportunities, and also the opportunity for visitors to L'Abri to get some hands-on acquaintance with art.

Looking for ways to while away those long winter evenings? Don't bother with TV. Sample one of the lesser-known phenomena of recent recreational publishing: the flourishing market in Tolkien games.

Suitable for all ages, based on one of the great moral fables of our time and generally beautifully crafted, they are prime candidates for any extra pocket money you may have accumulated in your Christmas stocking.

I'm writing in a damp grey bleak December as 2003 winds to a close. Although the wrong side of Christmas, it's my pleasure to announce the winners of the Evangelicals Now 2003 Arts & Media Awards, which as you know are the ones that people in the business really want to win.

The EN Award for Most Successful Unfinished Film Trilogy goes to Lord of the Rings, whose completion is currently an eagerly awaited Christmas treat. The only other contender for this award blew its chances royally with a dreadfully indulgent part 2 - I highly recommend The Matrix (part 1) as an excellent discussion starter for youth groups and other gatherings, but you're in for a frustrating evening if you try to make sense of the sequel.

A few years back I made my first (and so far only, though I'm open to offers) visit to San Francisco. I immediately fell in love with the city, so reminiscent of Merseyside where I grew up and now dotted with grey-haired men with pony tails who haven't quite grasped that the 60s are over. The ghosts of numerous guitars peopled a landscape I knew from documentaries, and when I stood inside the City Lights bookshop, why, it was as if Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac were about to walk in at any moment.

There was a bit of that nostalgia in BBC2's mini-series 'Grumpy Old Men', though it was a shock to find that their definition of 'old man' was one aged 35-54. This, 'the group that thought the world was going to get better - only it got worse', was judged to be the age group that grumbled more than its parents and more than its children. A strange feeling, to see a TV programme about old men and realise they're all younger than oneself. But not by very much, I hasten to add.

A large congregation gathered in Exeter on October 3 to say goodbye to Peter Cousins.

A giant of a man in every sense, Peter's career began in education, later moving to publishing; at the time of his death on September 24 at the age of 75, he was still editorially active.

Spain is really amazingly lovely. I say this for the benefit of those of you who, like me, tend to think of the Iberian Peninsula as full of drunken British holidaymakers and hotels that aren't quite finished.

But, as many of you already know, this accounts for only a narrow coastal strip of resorts. Elsewhere, it's a country of extraordinary landscapes, intriguing cities, plentiful antiquity, and a sensible lifestyle that involves sleeping for quite a lot of the afternoon.

The fourth series of Channel 4's 'Big Brother' was, by all accounts, a disappointment: a number of gimmicks introduced to spice up the fading annual spectacle failed to prevent a substantial drop in the expected viewing figures, despite the fact that the main tabloid interest seemed to be in whether anybody would actually have sex on screen this time.

At least, so they tell me. I saw very little of the show

In 1970 Angela Flowers founded a London gallery that was to become one of the leading showcases for British art. It launched many younger artists, promoted the work of established names, and in due course expanded into America.

Last month Flowers East, on the edge of East London, devoted its superb space to an exhibition by Peter Howson. At 43 one of Scotland's best-known contemporary painters, he commands six-figure prices and is collected by the likes of Madonna, Sylvester Stallone and David Bowie.

If the story were fiction people would call it far-fetched. The saga of Major Charles Ingram, who with his wife Diana and lecturer Tecwen Whittock tried to take 'Who wants to be a millionaire?' for a million, was given a huge amount of TV time. For example, it occupied a tedious 90 minutes on Easter Monday (digital viewers were offered a further hour), and a promised 'update' a few weeks later repeated much of the original footage with a few additional facts. Then, like most such stories, it slipped from the headlines.

For those who have other things to do with their time, here's how 'Who wants to be a millionaire?' works. Contestants answer a series of increasingly difficult general knowledge questions, the amount at stake rising until a million pounds hangs on the last question. For every question four possible answers are given. Contestants also have three 'lifelines', to be used only once each: phone a friend, ask the audience, and have two answers removed.

Not long ago, for a remarkably small amount of money, I bought an analogue satellite dish and receiver. It was just what I'd been looking for: no big films or sport, but loads of foreign public service broadcasting. I'd be able to watch German concerts, Albanian folk music, Greek news bulletins, you name it. No monthly subscription, either.

When I asked my local aerial fitter to set it up, I discovered why it was so cheap: most of the programmes I was interested in were on channels that had now moved to digital satellite, and could no longer be received on my analogue system. I should only pay to put the dish on the roof, said the fitter, if I was really interested in Albanian folk music, because that was probably all I'd be getting. What I needed, he said, was Sky. Everybody's getting Sky now, he assured me.

I flew with my wife last month to Pau, in southern France, for a week's break. We paid RyanAir the princely sum of a tenner each for the privilege, plus a little something for the airport tax authorities.

A friend who'd just spent ten pounds booking a flight to Sardinia put me on to this remarkable Internet deal.

Brookside, Channel 4's 20-year-old flagship Liverpool TV soap opera, is on its way out. It's official. The programme, previously screened on weeknights in prime time slots, has had dwindling audiences for some time now. It has been moved to a Saturday omnibus edition - broadcasting shorthand for 'We're taking this programme off air very soon'. When the news broke, Asda staff on Merseyside donned Scouse wigs and moustaches and launched a petition to persuade Channel 4 to change its mind.

Brookside (Brookie, to its fans) had become tough viewing, even for a Merseyside exile like me. I stopped watching a while back, when one storyline had become so plain nasty that I decided I couldn't stand it any more. Brookie disappeared from my life just as Neighbours and others did before it. But in its day, it was formidable television, with gritty narratives that made little concession to entertainment. Coronation Street offered Manchester-suburbia through rose-tinted spectacles, Dallas provided Hollywood glamour and sun-tanned stars, Neighbours was just one long beach barbecue, but Brookie gave you verisimilitude.

In my spare time I do cancer research. Not a lot of people know that I'm actually part of a worldwide team involved in an Oxford University project. It's run by an organisation called United Devices. What we do is 'help scientists characterise therapeutic targets and identify and assess drug candidates, by performing automated docking of flexible ligands to a protein's binding site'. We are a key part of current cancer re-search. And I don't even know what a ligand is, or where a protein keeps its binding site.

Oh, all right, I'll come clean. This is an arts column. I've never met or talked with an Oxford cancer research scientist. Actually it's my computer that does the re-search. Every time it's turned on and I'm not using it - and that includes the fractions of a second between key strokes, as well as the prolonged pauses for thought and meditation that are such crucially important parts of a writer's work - the computer is doing cancer research.

It will be old news by the time you read this, but your diligent columnist happened to ring at the right time and scooped the news that Eagle Publishing Ltd. will be represented to the book trade by IVP.

This is a good deal more exciting than it sounds, for it is the last step in the rebirth of Inter Publishing Services and its imprint Eagle. The collapse of the company has been one of the dominant Christian publishing sagas of the millennium so far.

Sometimes I wonder if I'm getting old. I suppose the facts are undeniable. Writing on the day England go through to round two of the World Cup, I even have dim recollections of the last time we won it. You don't live in two consecutive centuries without picking up memories. It's been a full life, Sven.

As somebody once said to the doctor who warned him that he couldn't make him any younger: I don't really mind, so long as I keep on growing older. Ronald Reagan said to a voter who implied he was too old to be President of the USA: 'How old would you think you were, if you didn't know how old you were?' We're all 25, fit and good-looking on the internet.

Every major news provider had an obituary on file, revised and updated every year or so as the Queen Mother's extraordinary longevity continued. She had planned her own funeral long in advance; the implications of her passing had been contemplated and discussed for decades.

The media pessimistically warned that public response would be disappointingly lukewarm. Even in the hours before her coffin was placed on its magnificent catafalque in the ancient Hall of Westminster, some commentators predicted that it would be mainly tourists who attended her lying-in-state, and speculated that its length had been deliberately kept short to avoid the embarrassment of a low turn-out. They were wrong.

The launch of the new TV channel BBC4 has been cautiously welcomed.

Some see it as a move to shift the good stuff off terrestrial TV on to satellite and cable. Certainly this cable-less, satellite-deprived columnist wasn't happy on launch night when BBC4 paraded its goodies on BBC2. The gloom-sayers speculate that BBC2 is going down-market in search of a wider audience, in a licence-fee-driven recruitment campaign. Channel 4's film channel doesn't compete as such with Channel 4, and BBC Choice was never advertised as 'a place to think' - but that's how BBC4 is being promoted. Pardon me, but some of us have cherished BBC2 for years as a place to think (with occasional thoughtless lapses), and are pessimistic about the future.

The other day we celebrated our daughter's 18th birthday. We wanted to organise a surprise for her, and decided on the London Eye, the huge ferris-wheel-with-pods that now dominates London's river.

The surprise worked - she couldn't work out where we were going until we arrived - and for me it was something of a milestone. Having had vertigo all my life, I'd always vowed nobody would ever get me up in the Eye. But faced with being a wet blanket on my daughter's big day, I steeled myself to do it. I'm happy to tell all you EN readers out there who share my dislike of heights that it's a wonderful experience. The pods are roomy so you don't have to lean against the window; the wheel rotates with a stately slowness that makes the experience a lot more manageable; and the views are just wonderful. Highly recommended.

George Harrison, 1943-2001

'How fast has brother followed brother', once lamented Wordsworth, 'from sunshine to the sunless land!' - a thought that has sometimes occurred to me in the past year or two as several icons of the 1960s have died, few of them of old age. It wasn't long ago that I was writing about Adrian Henri in these pages; now the news is dominated by the death from cancer of fellow-Liverpudlian George Harrison.

The quiet Beatle

Born in February 1943, he became the youngest Beatle, but George Harrison was a late starter as a rebel. Like Paul McCartney, he attended the respectable Liverpool Institute school which had a long tradition of sober dress and smart appearance: he adopted a jeans-and-long-hair style but had to abandon it when his parents disapproved. Later he formed a skiffle band with his brother, but when they secured their first paid gig they had to leave home in secret to get there because they were both too young legally to perform in public.

One of today's buzz-words in art is 'fusion' - the bringing together of two or more very different traditions to create something that draws from both but is neither. In music, jazz and classical music have often formed alliances - the use of the sitar has been popular with composers ranging from classical composer John Mayer to the Beatles.

Dance often draws upon very diverse national styles, British Black writers have fused their home culture with Britain's to create a distinctive new genre, and in popular dance music 'British Asian' is a technical term for a movement that draws from both sources.

As I write this, the television is full of images of appalling destruction, the aftermath of the terrorist attack on America. I had planned to write at length this month about our family visit to the States this summer, but for obvious reasons that will have to wait for another time.

Let me instead take a few moments to celebrate one small part of American Christianity, which we encountered during our visit: the Mennonite community in the Central Valley of California. We stayed with a Mennonite family near Fresno, whom we had got to know over the years through their visits to L'Abri Fellowship but had never visited ourselves.

Alpha - Will It Change Their Lives?

Moore TV, broadcast on ITV regions Sunday evenings.

VERMEER & THE DELFT SCHOOL Exhibition

National Gallery, London

Launched with relatively little kerfuffle, BBC2's new imported cartoon series God, The Devil and Bob features God (said to resemble Gerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead, but to my eye a dead ringer for Steven Spielberg) and the Devil (played as camp and English).

God has become disillusioned with humanity and wants to wipe it out and start again (there goes Genesis 8:21, for a start). The devil objects: they decide that if one human being can demonstrate that humanity is worth saving, God will abandon his plan. The devil chooses the human being at random - Bob, a family man, fond of beer, pornography and sport.

We had a family outing to London on the May bank holiday - a leisurely car trip, dropping off friends at Gatwick and then heading for Southwark and lunch in the venerable George Inn, one of London's most wonderful (and least-known) 17th-century survivors.

Southwark is a fascinating place, where ancient edifices hide behind ugly modern buildings that themselves jostle alongside some of the capital's most remarkable modern architecture. You can visit Sam Wanamaker's visionary rebuilt Globe Theatre, or stroll a hundred yards or so and see the site of the real Globe, marked out on a modern car park that now occupies the site - or visit the little museum at the Rose Theatre, where you can look down on the actual theatre foundations lying under water for preservation, waiting for a grant to excavate them properly.

A strange Easter in our corner of East Hampshire, as I write. We live on the edge of a small village through which 19 footpaths and bridleways pass. All are now sealed off, their entrances barricaded with foot-and-mouth notices.

The Government insists that the countryside isn't closed, but that demands an odd definition of 'closed' even in areas like ours that have escaped the disease so far. Not far away, one village reported an early case, which proved a false alarm. Since then Hampshire has been remarkably untouched by the tragedy - not just of the wholesale slaughter and of farmers facing ruin, but of the long-term implications for rural economies like that of the Lake District and the West Country, which may never recover. Certain breeds of sheep may be wiped out, for example. Uplands previously grazed bare may be covered in bracken thickets in a matter of a year or two. Farms unable to survive might become anything from golf courses to camping sites depending on local circumstances.

Publishing Christian art books today is a hazardous business; most of it is in the hands of small enthusiastic publishers committed to publishing art rather than building a business empire.

So it's been quite a surprise in the last year or two to see one of the most exciting developments in this field coming, originally, from Britain's largest publishing-and-bookshop giant, STL. The first mention in this column came with an enthusiastic review of Hilary Brand and Adrienne Chaplin, Art and Soul (1999), published under STL's Solway imprint and one of the most substantial books on Christian art to have been published in the evangelical market since Hans Rookmaaker's decades ago.

When news arrived of the death of Adrian Henri, Liverpool poet, painter and sixties icon, one of my first thoughts was that for most of the past 25 years, a self-portrait of him has hung close to my bed.

It wasn't an intentional act of homage - the painting was found abandoned in a flat that I and Tricia rented in Liverpool in the early 1970s, and the bedroom was the only place we had space to put it - but there's no doubt that Adrian was part of the landscape of Merseyside in those heady days, as much as the cathedral, docks and Toxteth landscape that he made into poetry. For me, he defined Liverpool in those days.

I know that you're all half-way to Spring by now, but I'm writing this a few days after New Year and am feeling extremely seasonal. So I present the Evangelicals Now Arts Quiz.

The first and only prize is an original hand-printed unframed photograph by Tricia Porter, to be selected by her from Over The Bent World: Images from Gerard Manley Hopkins, by David and Tricia Porter (Solway, 1999). In the event of a tie, the first correct solution opened will win the prize - or, if nobody gets it completely right, the one with most correct answers. Diligent readers of my column through the year will find themselves with a head start (that'll teach you to file back copies). Entries by post or fax only (no emails) to the EN office, please, by Friday February 2.

A television certainty is that if a series proves a big hit, the other channels will produce their own clones, all produced with wide-eyed enthusiasm as if nobody ever thought of the idea before.

If airports are your thing, or gardening, or archaeological excavation or any number of other activities, you have a wide choice these days. The other channels are even considering 'Big Brother' clones after the remarkable success of Channel 4's dreary exercise in voyeurism earlier this year.

Due to the way periodicals are put together, I am writing this during mid-November, and a bleak November at that. Gales and floods are sweeping Britain, misery is nationwide and the nightly news is full of stories of personal sadness.

It's a strange time to be writing about Christmas. But one of the magical things about Christmas is that it is a festival that really does mediate joy. Even as I write, the occasional glimpse of Christmas goods in the shops, the family Christmas plans that necessarily need to be made in advance, the rich smell of the Christmas cake in the oven, and even a few early Christmas carols all have the old power to recall all the Christmases you ever experienced, and for those of us who are Christians, to turn our thoughts once again to our Saviour's birth.

Of books and millennia

The other week I was the guest of the Librarian's Christian Fellowship at Winchester, where I was to give the LCF annual lecture (on Knowledge in the IT age, a theme you may have heard me expand on before in these pages). The Fellowship had arranged for its members and guests to be entertained in the morning by a guided tour of Winchester Cathedral Library.

Every time I go to Winchester - a mere half hour's drive from my home - I wonder why I don't go more often. After the guided tour I wondered why I had never visited the Cathedral Library before. The gift of a seventeenth-century Bishop who donated his large library to the diocese, it's housed in an ancient room built on to the Cathedral for that purpose. The books sit in stately rows on carved shelves, a pair of library globes that have sat in the room for centuries dominating the floor.

'Hell', Jean-Paul Sartre once memorably observed, 'is other people'. I've frequently remembered that while dipping into Channel 4's summer block-buster, Big Brother.

The theme of the show is simply ten people, locked up in a purpose-built house bristling with concealed cameras and microphones so that no detail of daily life goes unobserved. The five-million-plus TV audience sees life in the lounge, the bedrooms, the showers. (An early sign of how the participants would handle this publicity was a graphically-filmed episode where several used their naked bodies to paint the walls. If you happened to miss the painting, you could still watch a man and a woman showering together afterwards.) Each week the participants vote by secret ballot for two of their number to be evicted. The viewers then choose one of the two., As I write, three contestants remain. A final vote will determine who wins the £70,000 prize. So popular is the show that those evicted so far as busy selling their stories, usually for more than the prize money.

TATE MODERN

Tate Modern, Bankside, London SE1

I don't know whether you browse much in charity shops. It's one of my favourite pastimes; as an inveterate collector of other people's past enthusiasms I enjoy entering with a few coins in my pocket and emerging with carrier bags stuffed with treasure trove.

Our house is spatially challenged, so much of the stuff has to go back after it has been listened to, read or played with, but the coins go to worthy causes.

Even grown-up kids like myself have been caught out by this one. Anyone who has followed recent crazes, watching youngsters trading Magic Cards or seeing fashionable toys banned from school by zealous teachers, is aware of the addictive nature of many of today's playthings - parents, who end up paying for them, even more so.

And Pokemon bears many similarities to its predecessors. The appeal to the completist in every kid, the lure of the valuable card that might be in the next pack you buy, the magnetism of a new and alluring mythology into which the game draws you, the precarious balance between TV toy programmes and TV toy advertising, the necessary link with technology - we've seen all this before, and, to echo an anonymous Old English poet: 'That passed by; so may this.' Look out for most of today's Pokemon desirables in next year's Oxfam shops.

Seeing Salvation: The Image of Christ

National Gallery, London

Regarded by many as a triumph and by many more as a big-budget disaster, BBC2's adaptation of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast was never going to please everybody. Peake's trilogy has always been an acquired taste; hardly ever out of print, it has nevertheless been very much a cult. Some who love it most are hopping mad that it was televised, because now everybody will be reading it.

The TV series featured over 100 sets, using the resources of computerised illusions and exhaustive research. The biggest problem was how to portray Gormenghast itself - the rambling castle-township, dominated by inexorable rules and dead tradition, into which Titus, the 77th Earl of Groan is born and from whose depths the rebellious scullery slave Steerpike rises to threaten Gormenghast in its entirety.

Popular musician Jools Holland, two Millennium Dome organisers, and the Director of the English National Opera had the unenviable task last December of choosing the musical item that would play out the century in the Dome.

The shortlist included rock group Queen's 'We are the Champions' and 'Bohemian Rhapsody'; 'All You Need is Love' (The Beatles); 'Imagine' (John Lennon); 'Millennium' (Robbie Williams); 'Don't Look Back in Anger' (Oasis); 'Disco 2000' (Pulp), and 'It's Only Rock and Roll' (The Rolling Stones). The list made an interesting epitaph for the last 1,000 years, ranging from Robbie Williams's pessimism - 'We got stars directing our fate' and Lennon's bleak homilies - 'Imagine there's no heaven, it's easy if you try', to the music of Queen, described by critic Rosie Lane as 'an optimistic and truly British anthem in every sense'. I suppose that looking at the current headlines - everything from Chechnya to Gary Glitter - I would have to go along with Williams and Lennon, if I didn't have other points of reference. In the end, 'All You Need is Love' filled the vast spaces of the Dome, and as a secular anthem for a secular age it could have been worse. While it was all going on, somebody stole a Cezanne from the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford; there's probably a moral there somewhere.

And a Happy New Millennium to you all! Hopefully the Year 2000 bug didn't cause too much havoc, the city centres are by now unblocked, you can once again book a place to eat lunch in central London and that huge rotary wheel thing has not slid expensively back into the Thames.

I am writing this at the end of a bleak, damp November, with January still a long way away and the millennial buzz still going strong. There's a fair bit of future-gazing going on and some of the tabloids are filling space the easy way, speculating what the millennial world will look like. I shall be very surprised if G.K. Chesterton is proved wrong: he predicted that the future will look very similar to the present. It would be nice if it did not. The 20th century is sliding to a bloody end, with a disturbing similarity in the headlines of today and those of the first decade of the century. But the odds are that three noughts at the end of the calendar will not make us happier people.

Millennial fever has begun to take hold in a big way as the start of a new year brings us nearer to the magic year 2000.

Of course it's been building for a while. For a few years now, every restaurant in central London has been fully booked for late dinners on 31 December 1999; and predictions of worldwide economic collapse, as the 'millennium' bug makes millions of computerised businesses a hundred years out of date, has practically entered modern folklore. Artists and architects argue endlessly over the Millennium Dome; there is grief and glory in dozens of planning offices as applications to the Lottery Fund for millennium projects are granted or denied; and quite a few of us older people are wondering exactly what is in the Blue Peter time capsule.

P.G. Wodehouse once wrote that the best sales promotion for any book is to get it condemned by a bishop (a truth for which the estate of D.H. Lawrence is still immensely grateful). But I confess I was saddened by the response of some readers to my review of Ben Elton's Popcorn.

One published letter, and several unpublished, described my contribution as 'garbage', a 'slide into the depths of pornography', 'gibberish' and 'utterly unacceptable and spiritually dangerous.' I found it rather daunting, as a reader of Evangelicals Now and its predecessor for some 18 years, to be categorised as 'Mr. Porter and his ilk'.

The publishing industry, after several years of fearing that the Chancellor would impose VAT on books and newspapers, had something new to worry about last year; the longstanding Net Book Agreement was finally abandoned. Customers used to shopping around for the best price on carrots and turnips could now do the same with Tolstoy and Delia Smith.

Some said it was the best development in publishing for a very long time, and welcomed the increased competition. Others pointed out that publishing isn't the same as groceries. You don't stock good-looking carrots for the sheer prestige of it or because you think the farmer is worth encouraging, without reference to how many carrots you actually sell. But a surprising number of books are published for reasons that have nothing to do with profitability. 'Exactly', says the anti-NBA lobby. 'Try telling that to the struggling first-time novelist', respond the pro lobby.