RELIGIOUS TELEVISION AWARDS 2010

‘On 25th May 2010 the Rt Revd Nick Baines presented 4 awards at Lambeth Palace. Roger Bolton, chair of the judging panel, announced the winners.’ [source] From the speech by Roger Bolton:

We decided to give the second of our TV merit awards to a very different sort of programme. For BBC 2, Conor Cunningham asked Did Darwin Kill God?. His answer was “no” and he convincingly demonstrated to us that Darwin did not think he had done so either.

This sort of demanding programme is difficult to present on television, particularly at 7pm for an hour, when many potential viewers will still be getting home for work or making supper. And providing a visually appropriate accompaniment to an abstract argument requires considerable imagination on behalf of both director and presenter.

But the audience was over a million, and for many of us, the argument Conor Cunningham advanced was a welcome relief from the ritualised combat of extremists such as Richard Dawkins and assorted creationists, who are fighting a battle many think is more suited to the early 19th century than the 21st.