The Reverend Richard Coles – vicar, co-presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Saturday Live, author, winner of Celebrity MasterChef, and former keyboard player for 1980s pop sensation The Communards – has, in his own softly spoken and modest way, become something of a national treasure. Can he really be as overwhelmingly nice as he seems? I’ve no reason to doubt it, and his endless empathy is one of the many qualities that make him such a popular figure with the general public, and, one imagines, the God he serves with such distinction.
There’s certainly plenty of empathy around – and required – in Good Grief, an unusual documentary that deals with the terrible and still slightly taboo subject of bereavement. Coles lost his partner of 12 years, David Oldham, to alcoholism shortly before Christmas 2019, but the details aren’t dwelt on here. Instead, Coles takes us on what he terms his “bereavement journey”. During his many encounters with counsellors and people who are still processing deep, life-changing loss, he finds his “burden” – a pejorative but serviceable word – lightened by the experience of talking things through, and sharing the pain. He’s delighted, for example, when a rather forthright American therapist tells him, in the manner of a 1980s TV business evangelist, that the old adage that “time heals” is “just BS”. A lady in a “laughter yoga” studio helps convince him that the famous “five stages of grief” is a “misconception”. He chuckles with fellow widows who share amusing grief-based anecdotes – one of them tells him that he should treasure his time in early bereavement because “no one will ever be as nice to you again”. That sort of thing.
