Former Anglican priest rambles about marriage. Fails to make point. Makes many logical errors. Doesn’t seem to like Camilla. Possibly doesn’t like Archbishop.
Who: Reverend Canon Angela Tilby
What: Christian (Church of England)
Where: Retired
(Canon emeritus of Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford
LISTEN TO PODCAST
Original Angela Tilby Radio 4 broadcast
Transcript of the Radio 4 broadcast
The SecondThought Report (podcast script)
Welcome to the SecondThought for the day podcast. In this episode we dissect a Radio 4 Thought For The Day (TftD) to expose all that is not factful and reasonable. If all this has already stopped making sense, please listen to the Welcome podcast. No promised, but it might help.
This SecondThought podcast is in response to the BBC’s TftD from Thursday 10 April 2025, which was by the Rev Canon Angel Tilby. Tilby is a retired Church of England priest.
Tilby’s inspiration was the 2oth anniversary of the marriage of Prince Charles to Camilla.
Her message was apparently, don’t marry someone you don’t like.
This was a genuinely awful broadcast, please do listen to it. There’s a link to Tilby’s work (along with transcripts, the script for this podcast as well as other relevant notes and links at secondthoughtfortheday.com). I imagined at the outset of this project that I’d be evaluating the speakers largely on the basis of their liberal use of logical fallacies and their inability to discern fact from fiction. I did not expect these failings to be accompanied by unpleasantness directed at public figures. Today’s broadcast was a structureless cacophony of baseless claims, logical fallacies and inexplicable barbs. The conclusion was pinnacle of banality. This broadcast is little more than a quality-control klaxon in the BBC’s department of Religion and Ethics. As I said, awful.
It’s not entirely clear with what or whom Angela Tilby has a problem. It may be Archbishops, monarchy, the concept of divorce, Camilla or the dwindling role of the church in the matters of Kings and their spousal freedom. Who can say. She doesn’t give sufficient detail away for us to be sure. She has a problem with something, though, and the evidence is leaking everywhere.
The broadcast opens with a reflection on the 20-year anniversary of Charles’ marriage to Camilla. Tilby reports that the 2005 civil ceremony was followed by a service led by Rowan Williams, the then Archbishop of Canterbury. Tilby reports watching the event on television and her sense at the time that Rowan Williams seemed hesitant and uneasy.
Tilby then makes what is likely an unsupportable claim, that millions of others were sharing her inability to avoid thoughts of the death of Princess Diana (eight years earlier) in 1997.
TILBY: With millions of others I couldn’t get out of my mind the tragedy of Princess Diana’s death in 1997…
Speak for yourself, Tilby! At least, please try not to speak for millions of others, unless you can in anyway demonstrate that those millions do indeed share your thoughts.
This is opening shot to the foot. Why risk what credibility you might have with the Today Programme audience by making a sweeping assumption that also constitutes an unjustifiable claim within the first 15 seconds?
What’s most frustrating is that it was so simple to avoid.
Why not begin the sentence, “I suspect like many others, I couldn’t help but think about the tragedy of the death of Process Diana…”? Nothing wrong with that.
No unsupportable claim.
All ends achieved.
All risk avoided.
Bloody stupid.
Second, what’s this guff about the Archbishop of Canterbury?
TILBY: I remember watching on television, not quite knowing what to make of it. Even the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams seemed a bit hesitant, a bit uneasy as he conducted the service.
Is Tilby’s comment on Williams’ unease in any way relevant, or even accurate? I took to youtube and subjected myself to 30 minutes of an Archbishop. I don’t recommend it.
To me he appeared to do a better than average job. Perhaps it took him a while to hit his stride but, after watching several other clips of Williams doing his thing, this is not unusual. Although, I’m not sure ‘stride’ is really his goal.
Of more concern to me was the implied invitation for the listener to treat Williams’ supposed unease as some kind of support for Tilby’s earlier disclosed tragedy and death filled mind.
I suppose that if you’d spent much of your career as an Anglican priest, you might be forgiven for a higher-than-average preoccupation with death. The whole sequence seems inescapably irrelevant and unnecessary.
Then, with barely a breath and no segue, she announces that by 2005
TILBY: more people were prepared to shrug and accept what was going on
More than what? More than when? Jeepers Tilby, that is not only a hanging comparative but another unsupported claim. This time, that people had both shrugged and accepted “what was going on”. Presumably “what was going on” was that Camilla was marrying a man she’d apparently loved for most of her adult life. And he, her for most of his.
I was at this point beginning to wonder if her live performance was so bad, what we’re listening to is the product of a heroic BBC editor desperate to have something vaguely suitable to pad the slot.
Let’s for a minute revisit that shrug. It was abundantly clear to observers around the world that the prevailing attitude of the British people toward Camilla had undergone a remarkable revolution.
This was a woman whom relatively recently was being described on the front page of British newspapers as a Rottweiler, as Diana allegedly called her..
Describing the manner of the acceptance of Camilla as Charles’ wife and their future queen by a significant proportion the British people as a shrug might risk being interpreted as a cheap shot.
It feels as thought there something important to Angel that is being kept from us. Was there a love triangle? Was Tilby’s opportunity dashed by Camilla’s brutal man grab? I don’t think it’s that. Not a heart thing. Perhaps a petty, churchy political thing? I’m sure someone knows exactly what it is. If so, please get in touch.
Tilby then claimed that this acceptance of Camilla was
TIILBY: And that was not all due to good PR
For Odin’s sake Tillers. This is at best, unsporting. Now my judgement aside of what is and what is not sporting, it was another an unsupported claim, which was also a veiled claim: that the acceptance by the British people of Camilla as the wife of Charles was in significant part due to good PR.
Does Tilby have some beef with Camilla?
I guess it’s possible that Tilby hadn’t intended this to land as another sly dig. If so, I suggest she urgently needs to improve her approach to preparing a broadcast to a live audience of six million people.
She had here an excellent opportunity to mention some of the possible reasons for the acceptance revolution. The widely published accounts of Camilla’s humility, her dogged determination, her evident patience, good nature and good grace. There was not even mention of the Queen’s public endorsement of the marriage.
Then, dire as they are, things got worse. We were led to believe that medieval clerics in England saw marriage as somewhat removed from the church and little more than a contractual means of reining in fornication and enforcing social order.
We’re then invited to contrast this dark spell of matrimonial theology with the enlightenment that accompanied the first English prayer book of 1549. The prevailing requisites of fornication and societal control were now accompanied, for the first time, by a suggestion that those getting married should love and cherish each other.
Quite frankly, hogwash.
I’m not an expert but there’s a lot of straightforward and verifiable information out there for anyone with 20 minutes to spare and passing familiarity with the internet.
For the vast the majority of Christian history before 1549 in England, direction for the church was provided exclusively by Rome.
Marriage had long been considered by the Roman church to be an act of divine significance, at least since a thing called the Fourth Lateran council of 1215.
Since at least then, marriage was understood to be a reflection of the union between the church and Christ. Love and cherishment had, somewhat obviously, been front and centre in marriage since long, long before the scribblings an English Archbishop in 1549 were turned into a prayer book.
Tilby, one would imagine, has sound and deep knowledge in this field but the arguments and evidence to suggest that her marriage theology enlightenment claims are groundless, are not trivial.
If the payoff of this ill-prepared thought salad were worth it, such inconvenient facts might be considered little more than casualties of poetic licence. If only Tilby had for us such an ending.
She ends with these words:
TILBY: It is all too easy to marry for the wrong reasons. The important question for those couples contemplating marriage is whether they really like each other, whether they are prepared to stand by each other and help each other to be strong and resilient. As I look back twenty years to that rather tentative ceremony in St George’s chapel it seems to me that Charles and Camilla’s lasting friendship has been a blessing, both to themselves and perhaps to the rest of us too.
No shit, Angela?
Even to a causal observer, what Charles and Camilla have appears to be much more than a lasting friendship. Theirs appears to be a love that has survived an astonishing combination of onslaughts, including dissection by godly pundits on Radio 4. While hardly groundbreaking, the advice to ‘marry someone you like’ is innocuous in the absence of anything better, but why the flood of drivel that preceded it? To suggest that those in a friendship are blessed by it is a honking banality. What a wasted opportunity, an insult to the audience and a pointless effort. Just awful
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