Something is amiss, if not quite rotten, in Channel 4’s magnificent drama about the Church in Denmark

Something is amiss, if not quite rotten, in Channel 4’s magnificent drama about the Church in Denmark

Until this week most of my knowledge about the Church of Denmark came from the 1987 film Babette’s Feast, in which a community of dour, black-clad, strict Calvinists in nineteenth-century Jutland was revitalised by the richly carnivorous cooking of a shipwrecked French chef. Ride Upon the Storm, the magnificent drama now playing on Channel 4’s digital platform, All 4, is set in modern-day Copenhagen, among the pastors of the Danish Church – and none of them is dour, though a few could be said to be puritan in their own way.

The series (of which the first of two is available online) comes from the creators of the acclaimed Borgen; and what that series did for the high emotional stakes of Danish coalition politics, this may well do for the politics of religion. What makes it such compelling viewing is that it does not shirk from the idea of religious faith: here it is centre stage, not simply bolted on to plot and character and left unexplored.

The chief protagonists are the Krogh family members who have been pastors in Copenhagen for generations. The current patriarch, Johannes Krogh, is a charismatic and uncompromising figure – brilliantly played by Lars Mikkelsen (who was last year awarded a well-deserved Emmy for the role) as both ageing-hippyish and Bunyanesque. As the series opens, he is fully expecting to become the next Bishop of Copenhagen.

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