By Suzanne Moore
Mail Online

Last updated at 10:22 PM on 10th December 2011

So much time has been taken up lately with the unfunny, the outright offensive and debates about the pushing of comedic boundaries that we have overlooked the gem in our midst.

Rev, a show that has crept up on me.

A gentle comedy about a vicar hardly sounded up my street. Isn’t ‘gentle comedy’ a euphemism for not funny? Which explains why sitcoms have been replaced by endless panel shows.

Superb: Actor Tom Hollander as Reverend Adam. What would Jesus do if only a couple of dozen people showed up at his sermons?

The Vicar Of Dibley worked because of Dawn French and because it was set in a fantasy of rural England.

Rev stars the superb Tom Hollander, whose Reverend Adam Smallbone has moved from just such a parish to a multi-ethnic inner-city church.
He is surrounded by those who need him, not out of faith but out of desperation. Adam is a good man trying to do the right thing.

The humour and the issues raised flow from the characters, who are brilliant. Alex, Adam’s wife, is an outspoken solicitor.

There is a Peter Mandelson-type Archdeacon out to undermine him.

There is Colin the local drunk shooting squirrels, which he believes eat ecstasy in the trees. Mick the crackhead is a fantastic scammer – his mother has died three times recently.

These people are struggling and so is Adam.

The church is struggling. What would Jesus do if only a couple of dozen people showed up at his sermons? For this is the reality.

Rev stars the superb Tom Hollander, whose Reverend Adam Smallbone has moved from just such a parish to a multi-ethnic inner-city church

The real vicar of the location where Rev is shot says the cost of keeping the church going is a constant worry.

He recently had to go to B&Q to replace the door handles that had been on the building since 1740.

The church has to be locked at night or the fire extinguishers will be stolen.
Adam deals with the complications of those without hope or faith. Addiction is presented as the part of inner-city life, which it is.

Sex is something that vicars also do. This is adult humour, but it is full of humanity.
After all the discussions about Ricky Gervais and Frankie Boyle and what is and isn’t acceptable, we tend to overvalue the comedic impact of shock and undervalue lightness of touch.

I remember first seeing Eddie Izzard 20 years ago and being so relieved that not all stand-up was about politics. He could ask: ‘Why, if bees make honey, don’t wasps make marmalade?’

Rev is not surreal but it beautifully plays with the imagination – for faith is imagination.
The Church at the moment needs all the imagination and PR it can get after the dithering over the St Paul’s Occupation.

I say – yes, of course, from the outside – if the Church cannot talk about the morality of widening inequality, what is it for?

When times are harsh and the comedy of cruelty is everywhere, to see something with this much heart is a joy

As it happens, I was in the House of Lords last week, walking past the Bishops’ Bar, wondering why they need their own bar.

The peer I was with wants to see the Lords reformed and sees the bishops as a block to reform.

They clearly do not want their numbers cut from 26 to 12, which is what is proposed, but who do they represent in an increasingly secular society?

Rev, then, actually works as a fantastic advert for what a modern church can do. Adam has to deal with the ‘on your knees, avoid the fees’ pushy parents who just want to get their kids into a faith school.

He tries to take disadvantaged kids on a day to the country. ‘Who’s ever seen a cow?’ he asks naively.

All raise their hands. He is short on the petty cash and his wife wants more sex as they are trying to conceive.

Hollander hovers between faith and doubt in a perfect performance. And last week we even had a bravura onslaught by Richard E. Grant reprising his role in Withnail And I.
From ‘Bring me the finest wines known to humanity’, he has morphed into a totally amoral coke-addled merchant banker.

No great commentary on the system was involved. It doesn’t need to be: everything in Rev is lovely and understated.

Adam’s essential goodness is an uplifting, incredibly clever and beautiful thing. When times are harsh and the comedy of cruelty is everywhere, to see something with this much heart is a joy.

Rev is a revelation.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2072534/SUZANNE-MOORE-This-TV-vicar-does-good-26-relationships.html#ixzz1gElHxOQf