Does anyone here watch Grantchester on PBS?

[muriel_volestrangler]

49. A bit of background on the writer of the novels

James Runcie: 'My father would have been bemused and amused by Grantchester'

As Fifties-set crime drama Grantchester comes to ITV, its writer James Runcie explains how it was inspired by his father, the late Archbishop of Canterbury

Normandy, 1944. I am in a devastated area of woodland, facing a burning tank. Dead German troops lie in front of me. A group of soldiers emerge from the darkness and the flames. One of them is my father. He is 23 years old. Suddenly, there is more gunfire. One of the men is hit, wounded beyond hope. He cries for someone to put him out of his misery. My father crouches beside him….

This is when I should write, “And then I woke up.” But it’s not like that. I am outside Slough, in Berkshire, on the film set of Grantchester, and the actor James Norton is playing a character loosely based on my father, the late Robert Runcie.

In Grantchester, Norton plays the clerical detective Canon Sidney Chambers. This is his back-story, a wartime encounter designed to show that this particular clergyman is no softy pinko conscientious objector, but a man who has fought a war and is unsurprised by death.
...
Robert Runcie became a clergyman shortly after the war. He lived in Cambridge at the beginning of his ministry (I was born there) and was later chosen to become Archbishop of Canterbury in 1979. He didn’t go round solving murders, but when I began to write a series of six crime novels, intended as a moral history of post-war Britain, it seemed almost obvious to make the central character a clergyman (the only alternative would have been a doctor). He would be a fictionalised version of my father, sharing his love of humanity, his ability to think the best of people (while sometimes fearing the worst), his cheerfulness and his love of the ridiculous, as well as his sadness and disappointment in the face of human failing.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/11133894/james-runcie-on-grantchester.html

and:

James is currently working on a prequel to The Grantchester Mysteries. This will run from 1943 - 1951 and will feature Sidney Chambers' war-service with the Scots Guards in Italy, his first main love, his decision to become a clergyman, and his curacy amidst the ruins of post-war Coventry. It will be published by Bloomsbury in May 2018.

https://www.jamesruncie.com/