Now, in all honesty I did not expect to be placing a warning about Harry Clark Goes to Rome at the top of this review, but here we are and here we go. If you are a premenstrual, lapsed Catholic woman d\u2019un certain age, do not watch this documentary about the ex-army engineer and Traitors winner exploring his faith with anyone in front of whom you do not wish to be seen weeping buckets of inexplicable tears and wailing, \u201cHis mother must be so proud!\u201d. OK. That is my moral and professional duty discharged. Proceed at your own risk.<\/p>\n
Harry is \u2013 like, I suspect, both his parents and probably an unbroken line of Clarks before them \u2013 a cradle Catholic. He took part in the BBC\u2019s unexpectedly lovely Pilgrimage: The Road Through the Alps<\/a> last year, in which seven celebrities spent their time trekking and talking about their various faiths and none, giving us all a rare hour of reflective entertainment in the process. It was not difficult to predict that Harry \u2013 honest, guileless, a believer in God and his mum almost equally (\u201cShe says I\u2019m the smartest dumbest person she knows \u2026 I\u2019m just wired backwards\u201d) \u2013 would soon appear in his own religious documentary. He\u2019s a young, personable gift to the camera.<\/p>\n Harry has found himself increasingly wondering if he is a good Catholic. This is partly because he is a 25-year-old man with a modicum of fame who has evidently been enjoying most of what modern life offers a 25-year-old man, especially with a modicum of fame. And it is partly because after he left the army he struggled with his mental health to the point of feeling like \u201call hope was lost\u201d and that he might be \u201cready to leave this earth\u201d. For those of you not aware, the Catholic church teaches that suicide is a sin (your faith in God means that you should never despair and doing so is to betray Him), although Harry seems at least as stricken about what he put his family through, rather than God, at the time. His mum, he remembers, used to come home from her job at the hospital at lunchtime, then have to take him back there in the afternoon. \u201cI\u2019ll never not feel guilty about putting her through it,\u201d he says. \u201cYou weren\u2019t a burden,\u201d his mother says simply. \u201cYou were unwell.\u201d<\/p>\n Marvelling \u2026 Harry Clark and his mother, Georgia, in Rome. Photograph: Jonny Ashton\/BBC\/CTVC<\/p>\n The spine of the show is Harry\u2019s attempts to meet the Holy Father in the Holy City, but the heart of it is the relationship between him and his mum, whom he takes with him on his (literal) journey. They marvel at the marvels of Rome together: \u201cI just can\u2019t stop looking up!\u201d he exclaims, and notes later: \u201cIt\u2019s easy to feel super-holy in a place like this.\u201d They gather for the Angelus in St Peter\u2019s Square and gasp when Pope Leo XIV<\/a> appears on the balcony to bless the crowd of thousands below him. And Mum is on hand to explain why Harry\u2019s 24-hour fast, recommended by family priest Father Andy as part of his spiritual journey, hasn\u2019t yet made him feel closer to God. He is worried that it\u2019s a harbinger of things to come. That he\u2019ll finish the whole pilgrimage and feel more distant from his faith than before. \u201cI expect,\u201d she says with a wisdom deeper and more ancient than any religion, \u201cyou\u2019re just hangry.\u201d<\/p>\n He talks (once he\u2019s been properly fed) to Sister Emanuela from, counterintuitively, Wigan, who tells him it\u2019s time \u2013 after a decade-long pause \u2013 to go to confession (\u201cJust go in and say it! It\u2019s the truth\u201d). He promises her he will before he leaves Rome. \u201cBecause I can\u2019t break a promise to a nun!\u201d She knows and we know that he means it. It\u2019s a lovely moment.<\/p>\n As Harry tries to work out how you apply to see the pope in private, he meets increasingly senior members of the Catholic clergy. The viewer is again treated to that rare thing: engineered meetings that result in genuine conversations, without embarrassment or humiliation of one party being the secret engine or goal of the encounter. The cardinal, or whoever, can see that Harry may be essentially a naif but his belief and his questions are real, and \u2026 well, this is where I started crying so my notes are blurry from this point on.<\/p>\n Did he get to see Pope Leo? That counts as a spoiler, so I\u2019ll not say. But his mother, for all sorts of reasons, must be so proud.<\/p>\n Harry Clark Goes to Rome aired on BBC One and is on iPlayer now.<\/p>\n In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans<\/a> can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org<\/a> or jo@samaritans.ie<\/a>. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline<\/a> on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org<\/a>, or text HOME<\/a> to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline<\/a> is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Now, in all honesty I did not expect to be placing a warning about Harry Clark Goes to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":509914,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[96,59,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-509913","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-gb","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/509913","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=509913"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/509913\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/509914"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=509913"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=509913"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=509913"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}