Sunday 17 July 2016

Situations Vacant: Celebrity Priest

The parish of Giggling St Nicholas with Rolling-in-the-Isles is looking for a new Celebrity Vicar.

Set in a picturesque location featuring a number of offshore bird sanctuaries and two rustic villages, where pink sandstone cottages tumble down to sandy bays, and occasionally tumble enigmatically straight off the cliffs, we are acutely aware that we aren't getting the kind of tourist trade we ought. So we've driven the old, boring priest to a nervous breakdown, and now we're looking for a more telly-friendly model to attract the emmets.

The Celebrity Priest will ideally be young and single. They could be torn by a terrible loneliness, and photogenic when filmed in a boat heading to the little Chapel of St Aggie's Isle  (Electoral Role zero). That'd work quite well.

Alternatively they could be one of those jolly ones that we could get on Pointless, who get famous by cracking jokes constantly in the pulpit then going on the stand up circuit. Though, again, a sense of deep sadness would help for the 12-part documentary which features wonderful shots of honeysuckle-covered walls and the sun setting over St Bogwulf Island, as the rooks cry amidst the immemorial oaks (the immemorial elms having all died in the 70s).

Duties will include school assembly visits, where the children will come up with unexpected wisdom and outrageous doubles-entendres. There is a weekly service at the nursing home overlooking the golden sands of St Bloke's Bay. The residents of Giggling Residential Home are spritely, loveable and inclined to tell the sorts of heart warming yet racy stories that should go down well in the 8pm slot.

We have a surgery where the doctor is brilliant, erratic, grumpy but wracked by some terrible heartbreak in the past. So ideally he and the vicar could have an on-off, bittersweet relationship where each occasionally declares they'll have to leave the parish but can't quite do it, and the parishioners have to tell them how much we love them both. Ideally at some point one of them will propose, so we get a cliffhanger to set up another series.

We have services at both our churches, but to be honest not many people go. Though that will give the vicar the chance to agonize over the decline of Western Christianity, while filmed against the beautiful stained-glass of the martyrdom of St Sebastian. Or else crack jokes about everyone having to sit closer together to keep warm.

Belief in God is optional. A good profile is not.

NB - bloggers need not apply. They're not really famous, and they're all pasty and white.

4 comments :

  1. Don't forget to mention that people with pet allergies should not apply as photo opportunities hugging puppies, lambs and calves are ruined by bloated red an puffy flesh.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Don't forget to mention that people with pet allergies should not apply as photo opportunities hugging puppies, lambs and calves are ruined by bloated red an puffy flesh.

    ReplyDelete
  3. The on-off relationship with the local doctor would be even more interesting if both were the same sex

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    Replies
    1. My reprehensible gender-stereotyped mind had already assumed that they would both be male! I think I need to book on to a Beaker folk retreat for some re-education.

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