Fans of the PBS series Grantchester will have noticed that vicar-sleuth, Sidney Chambers, has a taste for whiskey and ale. But not sherry, which people assume must be the vicar’s drink of choice. He drinks to get drunk at upper-class dinner parties with Amanda and her set, and with the detective Geordie Keating at the pub. Alcohol plays a role in every episode. It’s not giving the plot away to say the murder in Episode 1 is solved when Sidney realizes it’s the wrong whiskey.
In episode 2 [watch here through February 22nd!] a friend from school days slips him an article “Alcohol Consumption in the Post-War Male” — from flashbacks it’s evident Sidney suffers for post-traumatic stress disorder. Other times he’s drinking to treat love-sickness. He’s self medicating. Sidney’s housekeeper makes it clear she does not approve of his drinking — that he keeps a bottle in his desk drawer. And it’s plain that alcohol affects Sidney’s work.
How do you see the role of alcohol in the series? Is Grantchester raising important questions about alcohol abuse? Or does it glamorize drinking?
Posted by John B. Chilton
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Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage
There is a romance to the way the alcohol is shown, though it’s done in a way that suggests lessons may be learned in due course. And I’ve always envied pub-culture, even when it’s portrayed — as here — in a kind of gritty, bar-cultury way. But, to my shame, what I keep noticing about the show is how good that linen clerical collar looks compared the the nasty plastic things we wear!
Indeed, I’ve always favored the linen collar. They are just so much more comfortable.
You are a priest?
Not the bicyclist who helped bring down Lance Armstrong?
I have noticed the use of alcohol and tobacco, every scene has a cigarette. At first I thought it was simply a directorial choice to be true to life at the time. (Used to teach theatre) Now I am leaning toward those social conventions as metaphors for denial and masking. Nothing happens in a scene by accident. On another topic, I thought the engagement with the issue of homosexuality was pretty spot on in terms of the time period depicted and thought it interested the way that various characters fairly represented the array of theological thought.
In the stories, Canon Chambers is stated to have preferred a single malt.
In the books, it was Bushmill’s Irish whisky, a product of Northern Ireland that the Ulsterman-murder victim was fond of. The whisky found on his desk was Scotch whisky. Inexplicably, the whisky in the TV show was Jameson’s, an Irish whisky made in the Republic of Ireland which is the Ulsterman’s tipple. I wonder why the switch?
But to the matter at hand, the show is doing a fairly good job of showing Canon Chambers as a person with problems, PTSD and drinking among them. It seems such an obvious part of the narrative that I’ve assumed it will be resolved in some way.
I like that the sherry issue keeps coming up. It subtly points to the fact that people presuppose all sorts of things about clergy. For instance, that they have a sip or two of sherry at most. Not so. That points to two problems: Sidney’s drinking, and people’s unthinking presuppositions about the clergy.
Mark, you’ve nailed it on the use of sherry and assumptions about the clergy.
More tea, vicar?
When I watched the episode about the wrong Irish whiskey I assumed Sidney was able to distinguish Bushmill’s from Jameson.
It seems I have the spelling of whiskey correct in the post title, and I should have referred to scotch (whisky) in the body of the post.
From a Scot: If it’s the episode of which I think you’re talking, it was Jamiesons’, which is Irish Whiskey.