Saints alive !

Spare some religious fervour for next weekend as well.

The ceremony at which Pope Francis will raise predecessors Pope John Paul II and Pope John XXIII to sainthood will be transmitted live in 3D (and Ultra HD) - and the Vatican has turned to (the) Sky for some three-dimensional expertise.

Sky Italia is flying out a range of news hands from Osterley to help with calling the shots, with pictures provided by six stereo pairs of HD cameras and three HDCam cameras converted on the fly, supported by UK firm Telegenic. Sky News has previously seen Catholic ceremonial as a potential audience winner - internally, a proposal to offer a 24-hour "Pope Channel" during the 2010 visit by Benedict to England and Scotland got as far as working out whether it would be possible to leave a camera on windows of buildings where Il Papa was sleeping before someone saw sense.

Pickled

The Tablet reveals that Eric Pickles was meant to go to Rome with Lord Patten for the cardinal-isation of Archbishop Vincent Nichols, but pulled out. Either because of water or wetness - take your pick.

When in Rome....

Quite a media-friendly party off to Rome this weekend, to accompany Archbishop Vincent Nichols as he becomes a Cardinal. BBC Chairman and leading lay-Catholic Lord Patten of Barnes will be there, alongside Communities Minister, Baroness Stowell, previously Head of Communications for three other BBC "Chairs", Gavyn Davies, Michael Grade and Michael Lyons. You can imagine them whittling away airport lounge hours with banter about governance and charters.

Vincent Nichols, as a lad from Crosby, is of course super-media-friendly, as a pillar of Prayer for the Day, Thought for the Day, and Radio 2's Pause for Thought.

Caution. Donkeys crossing.

Those security guards at Broadcasting House have had an interesting year patrolling the Entwistle Piazza at Broadcasting House. They've had to provide crowd control for the arrival of jazz-hands Tony Hall, Miley Cyrus and Britney Spears, as well as police a growing range of pressure groups who have forsaken Parliament Square for Portland Place to make their various points.

On December 19, it's horses and donkeys that might be problematic.  All Souls Church is staging two performances of the Wintershall Nativity, and Mary and Joseph will be make the difficult and dangerous journey across the twinkling lights of the piazza, and, we think, encounter the Angel Gabriel, before moving into the church for the rest of the "entertaining ecumenical play". Tickets here. 

All good practice for the top quality outdoor events that will undoubtely flow from the arrival of The One Show in the New Year.

A scheduling mystery

There was a late change to the BBC4 schedules last night, when many had been looking forward to a documentary entitled "Jerusalem: An Archaeological mystery".

This was the Guardian's preview....

Film-maker Ilan Ziv will likely ruffle some feathers with this documentary, which questions whether the Jewish people were exiled following the fall of Jerusalem in the first century. The expulsion of the Jews in 70AD, after a failed uprising against the Roman empire, has played a central role in Christian and Jewish theology. Ziv, sifting new evidence, casts doubt on this account, raising the question of what actually happened to the Jews, and exploring the impact this has had on the contemporary Middle East.

Is it possible feathers were sufficiently ruffled by such previews that the BBC was lobbied to re-consider ?  Viewers last night were offered instead a repeat of The Man Who Discovered Egypt.

The Mourning Sword

The back page of the Order of Service for Lady Thatcher's funeral carries Wordsworth's Ode: Intimations of Immortality.

I can feel a parody of the whole document being prepared for this week's Private Eye...