It became an instant hit with viewers for its female vicar, quirky cast of village characters and the gentle fun it poked at the Church of England. Almost three decades after the first episode was aired, the Vicar of Dibley, starring Dawn French, is still a staple of Christmas specials and fundraising telethons. The Rev Geraldine Granger even made several broadcasts to the nation during lockdown. But the archbishop of Canterbury has cast aspersions on Dibley’s vicar and other television clergy, saying they portrayed vicars as “rogues or idiots”, whereas in reality they are “hard-working, normal people, caring deeply about what they do”. Such fictional depictions of vicars were “depressing”, Justin Welby told the National Farmers’ Union. Departing from the text of his speech, Welby said he had “got into” watching Clarkson’s Farm on television during the pandemic. He told the audience: “Maybe for you watching Jeremy Clarkson feels a bit like for me watching anything with a vicar in it. Either you can’t stand it or you get completely addicted. I generally find depictions of vicars on TV to be depressing – they are portrayed as rogues or idiots … the reality is very different – it is actually of hard-working normal people, caring deeply about what they do and working all the hours there are to do it.” Welby has said that being a parish priest, for seven years in rural Warwickshire, was the most stressful job he had done. He was ordained as a priest after 11 years working in the oil industry. “The hardest work I’ve ever done, and the most stressful, was as a parish priest – mainly because it was isolated, insatiably demanding and I was on the whole working without close colleagues – and that wears people down,” he told the Church of England’s General Synod in 2017. The Rev Bryony Taylor, rector of Barlborough and Clowne in Derbyshire and the author of More TV Vicar?, a book about the fictional portrayal of clergy on television, said characters had become “a lot more nuanced and more rounded since the 70s and 80s, when they were total stereotypes”. Scriptwriters used characters “to make interesting stories that are going to entertain people. It’s not that interesting watching TV shows about nice people going about their everyday work. And people that write TV shows are not setting out to try to make the church look good.” One of her favourites was the vicar of St Saviours in Hackney, played by Tom Hollander in the series Rev, which ran from 2010 to 2014. “He’s quite flawed, and you love him for it really. He’s just trying to get on with the job at hand, and I identified with that guy,” Taylor said. At the time the show was airing, Hollander said his character was the opposite of “the cliche of a country vicar, partly because we wanted to depict England as it is now, rather than having a sort of bucolicy, over-the-hills-and-far-away, bird-tweeting England – we wanted the complications of the multicultural, multi-ethnic inner city, where everything is much harder”. Taylor also highlighted a clergyman in the crime drama Broadchurch. “That was quite a balanced portrayal. It showed how the church can bring communities together in times of great crisis and grief.” Another crime drama, Collateral, had a gay female vicar among its characters. “That was quite juicy, although a lot of my colleagues were slightly irritated because the character was very naive and a lot of rules were broken. But it was good to see a gay priest.” Taylor, the rector of two rural churches, echoed Welby’s comment about hard-working priests. “It can be quite lonely, you don’t have a big team around you, you don’t get much banter like you do in an office. And you’re dealing with a lot of expectation all the time. It’s a tremendous privilege, I love being involved in people’s lives in really key moments, but we work very, very hard and trying to create boundaries is quite challenging.” Catholic priests have also had starring roles in television dramas and sitcoms, including Father Ted, Broken, and Fleabag.