Richard Dawkins

If I said that Rev was better than The Vicar of Dibley it would raise to a disgraceful new level of felony the crime of damning with faint praise, like saying Le Gavroche was "better" than a place with the word carvery in its title. The comparison is going to be made, however, because both are - I'm taking much of this on trust rather than memory, having watched the few bits of the Dibley thing I saw with my mouth hanging open like a guppy, knocked punchy by its violent mediocrity, and I think some of my brain escaped - about, yes, vicars, dropped into new surroundings.

Where Dibley relied for laughs on, oh, I don't know, I assume someone fell into a jelly-cake at the fete every week, or there was a misunderstanding about a local spy or werewolf or some such with hilarious consequences, Rev doesn't. It relies on characters, and writing, and the laughs come along as do zephyrs on these hot muggy parkland days: welcome, but not absolutely necessary.

Tom Hollander stars as the Rev Adam Smallbone, who has come from rural-land right into a mouldering parish in east London. The rain, the lorries, the endless bollards: oh, London looks truly horrid. Adam's parish is that of St Saviour's-in-the-Marshes - even the name's smart (wouldn't the one marsh have been enough?) - and the church is not, as a less adroit production might have had it, one of those squat blue prefabs tagged onto a council scheme and built identically to the knifers' pub round the other corner. Instead, it's a broken piece of once-sepulchred glory, standing proud and apart in its dirty-white marbled "formerness", ignored by the cranes, the drizzle, the people: a fine pathetic fallacy for the church today.

Adam drinks too much, and soon meets the rag-tag regulars, from the devout to the desperate to the borderline criminal, and discusses them in cheerily humanly bitchy fashion with his solicitor wife, played by the ever-splendid Olivia Colman, who makes him take off his dog-collar before he even dares to come into the bedroom, which we'd never really thought about before, but you would, wouldn't you? Soon, too, he meets the new breed of churchgoer, the parents, the moneyed mean, flocking there after a rumour that the related faith school is about to get a fine Ofsted report.

Nominally, this opener was about a broken stained-glass window, but that's like saying The Great Gatsby was about a party. Even the broken window, incidentally, has character. We never need to see it, just its boarded-upness, but Miles Jupp as Nigel, the worryingly intense bearded polymath of a parish assistant, tells Adam of its Burne-Jones influences, of its strange "fauvist brutalism but with figurative depictions of the mentally ill", and you sort of know just the mad kind of mid-Victorian artsy window it was, and probably well broken. But that's just the window. It's really about, of course, the tensions within the church today: the need for everyday hypocrisies, the money worries, the secular appetites, the consequences for more mainstream British religions of rising Islamophobia, and, nicely, the continuing relevance of everyday kindnesses, even of the church itself. And, of course, the schools issue, turning the building into a pantheon to hypocrisy on the part of both church and parents. I worry, or rather hope, that Nigel will go quite loopso at some time in the series: somebody, surely, has to remember the sordidity of the moneylenders in the temple, and angrily kick over the tables. Hollander, curiously reminiscent in his boy-man features of Tom Hulce (Mozart in Amadeus, all those years ago), lets all the layers of frustration, disappointment, childish hope, sweep across his face like summer storms; his is a great expressive face to be left with pouches of sadness, and lines of glory.

What I'd love to see, later, in what I hope will be other series, is a walk-on part for Richard Dawkins. It's a very cleverly written (by James Wood) programme, this: I'd like to think he might just do it.

In a medium awash with lazy stereotypes, it's original thinking that stands out. The most compelling television provides a new perspective on an old story, and challenges the laziest of preconceptions with wit, humour and more than a dash of bravado.

BBC Two's new series Rev is pretty much a masterclass in how to pull this off. Take one fine actor (Tom Hollander), add an equally brilliant supporting cast (Olivia Colman, Steve Evets, Miles Jupp, Lucy Liemann, Simon McBurney, Ellen Thomas), choose a fraught subject (religion), throw in some punchy writing (James Wood) and get Peter Cattaneo (of The Full Monty fame) to direct the lot and what have you got? A damn fine reason to stay up late on Monday nights, that's what.

Firstly, the subject matter: religion, or more specifically, the Church of England. With the notable exception of Father Ted, comedies involving vicars tend to be soporifically safe. Not only is Rev travelling without seatbelts, it is also doing 90 miles an hour down country lanes with the roof off and the stereo on full blast. This is no gentle cake-and-cassock comedy; it's the story of an ordinary, fallible vicar living in a tough, brutal world who is trying to do something very extraordinary: stay true to his faith.

That the Reverend Adam Smallbone is an ordinary fellow we know from his behaviour. He is a man who jumps the lights on his bike, who gets nervous and drinks too much at parties, who tries (and fails) to have sex with his wife. His flawed but irresistibly likeable persona comes across loud and clear in just a few opening moments, brilliantly pinpointed by the direction, the writing and, of course, by Hollander himself, whose performance is outstanding.

The themes, too, are unrelentingly contemporary. Smallbone is in charge of St Saviours, a grand, dilapidated church in a run-down inner-city area of London with a confusingly mixed catchment. There are the regulars, a rag-tag collection of locals led by Colin, the neighbourhood ne'er do well, who has a fond affection for the "vicarage"; and there are the newcomers, in the shape of the arrogant, urbane middle classes, led by the local MP, played as a modern-day social Flashman by Alexander Armstrong. Simon McBurney is deliciously oily as the Archbishop, who Smallbone only ever seems to encounter in the back of a taxi, all black leather gloves and dark threats.

The opening theme is current and controversial: "On your knees, avoid the fees", chirps Armstrong's villainous MP, as he horse-trades a place for his delinquent son in exchange for cash to repair the broken stained glass window of St Saviours. It's a merciless commentary on modern life; but it also has a surprisingly strong moral, dare I say thoughtfully theological, core. The temptations that assail Smallbone may be very contemporary in their nature; but they are as eternal as the themes of the Bible itself: right v wrong, truth v corruption, the poor v the rich.

As to the comedy, it's of the organic kind, not the obvious gag kind. Outside the church, the Reverend and Colin share a bottle of beer and discuss Richard Dawkins (as you do). "If I met him I'd kick him in the bollocks," says Colin, with customary frankness. Earlier Smallbone, confronted for the nth time by a group of sneering builders and their spectacularly unfunny jokes about choir boys, pauses. Slowly, and with a look of weary resignation, he removes his dog-collar. "Why don't you just f*** off," he says. The viewer punches the air with joy.

Film Review: The Infidel

It wasn't that long ago that atheists were confident they had won the battle against religion. It's a mark of just how much things have changed that atheists once again feel moved to go on the attack. First came the men of reason - Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens - and now along come the comics, armed with the weapons of ridicule. On stage, we've already had Jihad! The Musical, and, coming soon to a cinema near you is Chris Morris's much-anticipated Four Lions. Both are controversial works that set out to show the funny side of religious fundamentalism.

He might be a friend of Ricky Gervais and a radio panel game regular, but Robin Ince isn't your average stand-up. He also runs a comedy institution called The Book Club, which involves him reading aloud from random second-hand tomes, and is a vocal atheist who curates gigs themed around science, Darwin and rationalism. This is a TV version of his festive variety show 9 Lessons and Carols for Godless People, which combines gags from Dara O'Briain, Al Murray, Shappi Khorsandi and Chris Addison with music, plus more intellectual fare from scientists and writers - the movement's daddy, Richard Dawkins, among them. Stimulating stuff.

Here's a tinsel-brandishing variety show for the rationally minded. Recorded at the Hammersmith Apollo in London before Christmas - or should that be Yule? - it features a motley collection of performers. Atheist-in-chief Richard Dawkins leads the cast which includes physicist Brian Cox, Ben 'Bad Science' Goldacre, writer Simon Singh, musician Robyn Hitchcock and comics Richard Herring, Mark Steel, Shappi Khorsandi, Barry Cryer and Ronnie Golden.