The parish church

From church mice to murder at evensong, Thomas Gray's Elegy written in a Country Churchyard to The Great Sermon Handicap featuring Jeeves: today's Words and Music takes inspiration from the parish church.

Choral Evensong is the BBC's longest-running outside broadcast programme and first aired on 7 October 1926. Words and Music marks this anniversary with a selection of settings of psalms and favourite hymns like The Lord's My Shepherd and Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring. We feature Howard Goodall's theme music for the TV series The Vicar of Dibley and recordings by Oxford Camerata and the Sacconi Quartet.

A number of guides to church visiting have been published in recent years, and you'll hear extracts from some of those alongside poems by Philip Larkin, Walter de la Mare and RS Thomas; writing by Dorothy L Sayers, Barbara Pym and Bill Feaver and modern novels including Catherine Lacey’s Pew, Richard Coles’ Murder Before Evensong and Chibundu Onuzo’s Sankofa.

Our readers are Debbie Korley and John Telfer, who plays Reverend Alan Franks in Radio 4's The Archers.

Readings:
R.S. Thomas – Kneeling
Here is the Church – trad.
Rachel Morley – Church Crawling
Walter De La Mare – Frescoes in an Old Church
Thomas Gray – Elegy written in a Country Churchyard
Graham Oakley – The Church Mouse
John Betjeman – Diary of a Church Mouse
Thomas Hardy – In Church
Dorothy Sayers – The Nine Tailors
Nicholas Orme – Going to Church in Medieval England
Rev’d Richard Coles – Murder Before Evensong
Barbara Pym – Some Tame Gazelle
PG Wodehouse – The Inimitable Jeeves: The Great Sermon Handicap
The Diary of Samuel Pepys
Simon Jenkins – England’s Thousand Best Churches
Philip Larkin – Church Going
Lamorna Ash – Don’t forget we’re here forever
Bijan Omrani – God is an Englishman
Zadie Smith – NW
Lis Howell – The Chorister at the Abbey
Jill Paton Walsh – A Parcel of Patterns
Catherine Lacey – Pew
Chibundu Onuzo – Sankofa
William Feaver – Piperism
Francesca Weekes – A Church on the Edge of the World

Produced by Ruth Watts