ITV under attack from Ofcom, unions and God

ITV is facing another investigation after it failed to match its quota for programmes to be made outside London for two years running. The network is required by the government to spend half its budget on productions made outside the capital. Figures to be revealed by Ofcom today show that it fell well short of that at 44% last year. After being forced to audit and restate 2006 figures, it missed the target that year too, at 46%.

"It is something that Ofcom is taking very seriously and we are looking at what action should be taken," said the watchdog's market research director, James Thickett. "Action could potentially include fines but at the moment we are not in a position to comment on any sanction we might impose." The latest investigation into ITV follows Ofcom's imposition of a record £5.7m fine on the broadcaster this month for "misleading its audience" over years, causing viewers to waste millions on worthless premium-rate calls.

Sources at ITV said last night it would like to see a reassessment of the level and criteria used by Ofcom, particularly given disparities between requirements on ITV and its rivals. The other public-sector broadcasters all met or exceeded their out-of-London targets in the past two years. But their quotas are lower: 30% for the BBC and Channel 4 and 10% for Five.

Programmes must meet two out of three criteria to qualify as out-of-London productions. Ofcom asks whether a production base was outside the M25 motorway, what proportion of spending occurred outside the M25 and how much of the behind-the-camera and on-screen talent are from outside London. In ITV's case, that means that even though shows such as Doc Martin and Kingdom are made in Cornwall and Norfolk respectively they do not count towards the quota because other criteria are not met. ITV insisted it was "committed to a diversity of production". "We recognise that we must comply with these challenging obligations and we will be taking the necessary steps to meet the quota in 2008," said a spokesman.

The company is also on a collision course with unions over production outside London. Broadcasting union Bectu yesterday lambasted ITV's announcement this week that it wants to make 89 staff redundant, with job losses targeted on production centres in Leeds and Manchester. It said that was at odds with ITV executive chairman Michael Grade's pledge under a turnaround plan to increase the levels of in-house production.

"What is clear is that the company's turnaround plan is failing," said Bectu's David Beevers. "The five-year plan promised acquisitions and greater commissioning power to re-establish ITV's network presence. Those objectives are not being met so the company reaches for its most cowardly weapon, the P45." An ITV spokesman said: "Technological advances in production techniques combined with a slowdown in studio commissions means that the level of resources staff in Manchester and Leeds is higher than required for the business levels forecast."

ITV was also attacked yesterday for entering just three religious programmes for the annual Sandford St Martin Trust's awards rewarding excellence in the genre. The Reverend Colin Morris, the chair of the awards judges and a former head of BBC religious broadcasting, speaking at the prize ceremony at Lambeth Palace in London, said he thought it was sad that ITV seemed to have "abandoned religious broadcasting".

ITV put three programmes up for this year's Sandford St Martin Trust awards, out of a total of 43 submissions from broadcasters. BBC2 documentary The Boys from Baghdad High won the trust's award. "I think it is sad that one of our great public service broadcasters seems to have abandoned religious broadcasting," Morris said.

Morris, also the former head of BBC Northern Ireland, added that ITV's stance was a sharp contrast to the rest of television, which "generally has discovered God ... or Allah" – a reference to the number of programmes about Islam – and was making high quality religious output. However, the award judges did pick out for special mention a clip from one ITV documentary, Little Town of Bethlehem, which followed the plight of Jews and Arabs in the town.

Though BBC2 won the main award with The Boys from Baghdad High, a documentary following four teenagers of different religious backgrounds, Morris added that the BBC's submissions generally tended to "be celebratory rather than analytical". He expressed disappointment that none of the BBC's submissions this year had been "in the tradition of Everyman or Heart of the Matter".

Conservative MP Ann Widdecombe, who presented the awards, also commented on the entries: "There is a great deal about the body on television, cookery, beauty, exercise, and psycho babble, but very little about the soul." Widdecombe also pointed to the fact that three of the four programmes to win awards were about Islamic themes and society. "I hope next year the winners will come from the Christian religion. There is a creeping embarrassment about Christianity," she said.

Maher faces firing squad again

While most of the media attention focused on Pope Benedict XVI's trip to the United States was overwhelmingly positive, one television show host's choice words for the pope and the Catholic Church landed him in hot water. And an apology has only stoked the fire. Bill Maher, host of Real Time on HBO, spouted off a rant on his April 11 live show that had many calling for his resignation.

As Benedict was readying for a six-day trip to the United States, Maher was critical of the Catholic Church because he feels the religion was treated differently after its sexual abuse scandal because of its history, size and clout. Maher also took comedic jabs at the pope, commenting on his attire and harping on the fact he was part of Hitler Youth -- a group he was forced to join and one he eventually fled.

Maher said: "If you have a few hundred followers and you let some of them molest children, they call you a cult leader. If you have a billion, they call you 'pope.'"

After the backlash, Maher offered an apology on his April 18 show: So, on that score, you know what, my Catholic friends, I will never make the "pope is a Nazi" joke again. Because, you're technically right, OK, and also because it distracts from the main point. And the main point I was making was that if the pope, instead of a religious figure, was the CEO of a chain of nationwide day care centres who had thousands of employees who had been caught molesting children and then covering it up, he would have been in jail.

Bill Donohue, president of the The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, replied: "We accept Maher's apology for accusing the pope of being a Nazi. Too bad he didn't stop there. For him to suggest that Pope Benedict XVI was in charge of policing molesters, and failed in doing so, is patently absurd."

The American Life League, a Roman Catholic group, has set up a Website asking for the outright firing of Maher. The New York native is, of course, no stranger to controversy. In 2002, ABC decided not to renew his show, Politically Incorrect, after Maher commented that the 9/11 terrorists were not cowards.

Long looks at the Pope, but a glimpse of the man

A papal visit is a lot like a royal wedding — a television spectacle that requires vivacious but respectful commentary and a lot of talk about pageantry and the personality behind the throne. Pope Benedict XVI’s first official visit to the United States comes closer to Prince Charles’s second wedding, to Camilla Parker Bowles, than his first, the 1981 extravaganza that starred Diana — and not just because both this pontiff and Ms. Parker Bowles, the Duchess of Cornwall, have endured the same tabloid nickname, Rottweiler.

The pope’s six-day visit lacks the thrill and historic drama that coloured Pope John Paul II’s trips to the United States, but the occasion is still momentous enough to pump up the live shots, telegenic priests and papal biographers. Non-stop coverage provides a dizzyingly catholic look at the Roman Catholic Church, seamlessly binding together the thorniest Vatican troubles — paedophile priests, shrinking parishes, non-observant believers — with papal mystique and fun Vatican facts.

As the pope’s plane landed at Andrews Air Force base on Tuesday, a CNN correspondent on the scene reported Benedict’s statement that he felt “deeply ashamed” of priestly child abuse while also noting that this pope plays the piano (mostly Mozart), prefers Fanta to wine, and is, as the reporter put it, “more human than you think.”

His is apparently a temperament more suited to small audiences than big crowds, better in camera than on camera. But the pope’s mission in Washington and New York does not break new ground so much as it repeats momentous steps taken by John Paul II, from addressing the United Nations to holding rock-concert-size Masses in sports arenas. But because he is the first pope to visit the United States after the sexual abuse scandal, much attention will be focused on his personality and his efforts to minister to the North American church. And Benedict hinted at his pastoral style by first addressing the issue aboard his plane en route, far from maddened crowds and obtrusive close-ups.

So far, at least, giving viewers a better sense of his character has required some improvisation.

Cable news channels and the networks interrupted their regular programming to provide live coverage of the pope at the White House as he read his speech precisely and evenly in a slight German accent. He graciously shook hands with cabinet members and elected officials (Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker, kissed his ring). The pope, who turned 81 on Wednesday, smiled winningly when the crowd broke out in a ragged version of “Happy Birthday.” He looked pleased — he smiled and stretched out his arms to well-wishers — when the soprano Kathleen Battle led a more expert rendition of the song. But it provided, at best, a fleeting look at the pope. TV commentators tried to compensate, extolling the excitement of the crowds and the geniality of the guest of honour. One anchor declared that the pope looked “thoroughly overjoyed.”

So were some commentators. On Today on NBC, the newest co-anchor, Kathie Lee Gifford, discussed what the pope’s arrival meant to her. “I was doing my Pilates when his plane touched down, and nothing usually keeps me from that, you know,” she said. Ms. Gifford, who is not Catholic, added: “I was moved. I just teared up.”

The visit is a news event that also serves as a kind of running infomercial for the Vatican: theologians and priests recruited to provide their expertise about the papal mission also relish the opportunity to move beyond scandals and advance the church’s message. Or their own message. On Fox News, Shepard Smith underlined the religious congeniality between President Bush and the pope, whom he described as an “honorary Republican.” And Msgr. James Lisante, a Fox News contributor, told Mr. Smith that he detected a political message buried in the pope’s speech. “If Senator Obama or Hillary Clinton are listening to the speech and want the Catholic vote, and they clearly do, then they have to know what the Holy Father is saying: ‘The sanctity of life is very important to us,’” he said. And if they do not pay attention, Monsignor Lisante warned, “then we can’t take you seriously either.”

(Actually, it was Mr. Bush who said “all human life is sacred.” At the White House, Benedict did not mention the church’s position on abortion or birth control, although he used language indicating his opposition to abortion later in the day.)

Throughout their coverage, commentators struggled to give viewers a better sense of the elderly man in the white robes. “He’s a shy, modest man,” said David Gibson, a Benedict biographer. “Less a showman than a scholar.” Cardinal John P. Foley, an American who was the Vatican’s chief of communications for years, summed up Benedict’s character as “clarity with charity.” On the “CBS Evening News” on Tuesday, the Rev. Thomas Williams resorted to American vernacular. “He’s a really nice guy,” he said.

TV actor Beghe attacks Scientology

American TV actor and former Scientologist Jason Beghe has labelled the controversial religion “destructive” and a “rip-off” in a video interview posted on YouTube, writes Veronica Schmidt.

The 48-year-old is the first celebrity to speak out against the religion, telling how his 12 years with the church have damaged him. “My experience personally, and what I’ve observed for myself, is that Scientology is destructive and a rip-off,” said Beghe, who has acted on Cane, CSI and Veronica Mars. "It’s very, very dangerous for your spiritual, psychological and mental, emotional health and evolution. I think it stunts your evolution.”

The actor, who estimates he gave the church $1 million (£500,000) over 12 years, has also given an interview to New York publication The Village Voice, explaining the church’s relationship with Hollywood heavyweights. Beghe claims Scientology’s fascination with celebrities is not just a PR exercise but that the late founder L. Ron Hubbard, a science fiction writer, had made it clear he wanted celebrities recruited to the church.



If a member could recruit a celebrity, Beghe said, they were rewarded by having the contents of their “ethics file” – the record of misdeeds admitted during “auditing” or spiritual counselling – cleared. The church, which has dedicated Scientology Celebrity Centres, counts Tom Cruise, John Travolta, Kelly Preston and Kirstie Alley among its members.

Beghe has also revealed how he became frustrated with the religion after requirements for training continually shifted and an increasing amount of money was required to continue in the church.

The interview is the latest in a series of blows for the American-based church. In January, an embarrassing video clip of Cruise discussing Scientology was leaked onto YouTube. The clip was followed by a further video in March of Cruise celebrating his birthday with members of the church. The church insists it brings its members “spiritual enlightenment” and it has helped the world progress towards “the eradication of its ills”, including drugs, crime, violence and intolerance.

The three-minute-long video, posted by the prolific Scientology critic Mark Bunker for XenuTV on Monday, is to be followed by a longer interview this weekend. Beghe insists he does not have an axe to grind and has spoken out to help others who have become involved in a religion he now believes to be at best unhelpful and at worst damaging. “I don’t have an agenda. Right now I’m trying to help,” he said.

Joseph Mawle: Playing Jesus

Playing the Son of God is not an easy role- particularly for up-and-coming actor Joseph Mawle, who has had to overcome deafness and dyslexia to play Jesus in BBC 1's The Passion. Cassandra Jardine reports...

I have met Jesus. Appropriately, he is 33 years old. Less suitably, he has short brown hair, strangely slanted green eyes and lacks confidence. He is also profoundly dyslexic and largely deaf. Perhaps anyone would be nervous, having been catapulted from obscurity into playing the Son of God, but Joseph Mawle felt ill-equipped for such a divine part. On the farm in Warwickshire where he grew up, church-going was a Christmas- and Easter-only affair. "My family were Christian but definitely not evangelical," he says, rather overstating, I suspect, his parents' enthusiasm. "Does that make me Mary?" his mother asked, irreverently, when he told her he had been offered the part.

Mawle describes himself as a "humanist" - a careful choice of words designed not to offend, because there are many dangers lurking for the man who plays Jesus. Robert Powell, who starred in Zeffirelli's 1977 film Jesus of Nazareth, said: "You always offend someone, and never live up to someone else's expectations." Seeking guidance on how to play the role, one of Mawle's first ideas was to approach Powell for advice. "I contacted him through his agent, but he never got in touch," he says. Then a minor miracle occurred. "The day I was flying out to Morocco to begin filming, I walked into the toilet at the airport and there he was, washing his hands. I tapped him on the shoulder and told him who I was."

"Oh my God," said Powell (or is that just fanciful?) Then they both stood staring at each other, dumbstruck. "Finally, I asked him if he had any advice and all he said was: 'It's one of the hardest jobs you'll ever do'." That wasn't much help. Not for someone who was already over-awed by the prospect of working alongside more experienced actors. James Nesbitt plays Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea, and Ben Daniels is the high priest, Caiaphas, in this even-handed version of the Passion, which makes the "baddies" more sympathetic than usual and upgrades Mary Magdalene from prostitute to widow. But there remain hordes of disciples in beards and droopy robes, among whom Jesus has to stand out.

Powell established Jesus's otherness by never blinking. "If I had tried that," says Mawle, "I would have ended up blinking like a madman." The research was not easy. He read the gospels in six translations, but they weren't as much help as he had hoped. "There's no description of his physical attributes. They just tell the journey and the teachings. I was left with a blank canvas but a vast responsibility, as everyone in the Western world has their own image of him."

Further reading was required - a chore for a man who is so dyslexic that he spent his early teenage years in a boarding school for special needs. "Look, I've got it here," he says, scrabbling in his bag for The Jesus I Never Knew by Philip Yancey, which has been his trusty companion this past year. He read it again and again to get under the skin of the Galilean carpenter who lived 2,000 years ago. The thing that stood out for him was a single sentence: "God didn't cheat."

"What I think he meant was that Jesus felt everything a man would feel. He's incredibly human, he expresses fears, anger, lust, love. For me, he not only made the sacrifice of his death but the sacrifice of not having a family. He and Mary Magdalene really loved each other."

The facial hair that made Mawle look like the face on the Turin shroud during filming has long gone. But even cleaned up he has a strange intensity. I can see why Nigel Stafford-Clark, the producer of Bleak House, who cast him, describes him as having "a way of holding your attention". When you talk to him, he watches your face intently, lip-reading. I've been told that he doesn't like to talk about his deafness, but that turns out not to be true. He doesn't want to be seen as a deaf actor, but he doesn't mind talking about being an actor who has overcome a disability. In daily life, he wears two discreet hearing aids, but he takes them off when he's acting because they produce a foggy sound. "It feels more natural not to wear them. I can usually tell when people are about to speak from their quirks and tics - though there have been times when I've had to ask a director to pinch my foot so I know when to come in."

He wasn't so sanguine about the deafness when it first struck at 16. Even before that he was having a difficult time. One of three children, his mother was a teacher and his father a farmer - a background that gives him the distinction, rare among actors, of having tractor-driving as a skill. But being dyslexic made his school life hard. He once played Dick Whittington at primary school but he was "too unconfident" to do more acting there, or at the boarding school he attended from 13 to 16. He won't name it, but he had a "really tough time" there; meanwhile, his parents were splitting up. "The best times were Saturday film nights. I disappeared into those films. I left there a quiet, passionate person who wanted to act."

Mawle left school at 16 to pursue that ambition, but almost immediately got an infection - labyrinthitis - which destroyed the hairs of his inner ears, leaving him 70 per cent hearing-impaired in the upper register and with tinnitus, a constant ringing in the ears. "Deaf. Dyslexic. Give up, man," remarked a helpful friend. "It was a dark time," he says. "I spent a lot of time in the gym, channelling all my angst and aggression into making myself huge. Really, it was a cry for help." At 16 he weighed 13 stone and had only 4 per cent body fat.

Living alone in a caravan in his grandparents' garden, near Stratford-upon-Avon, he felt he had nothing more to lose, so he begged the director of the local college to let him study drama. He worked as a fitness instructor, washed dishes and did some tiny acting parts before he applied to the Bristol Old Vic theatre school, which had recently taken on two blind students. He got a scholarship, but even after voice training his troubles weren't over. He left in 2002 with no agent and worked as an assistant in a special needs school. Life was looking bleak until his disability suddenly became a selling point.

A deaf actor was needed for the lead role in Soundproof, a TV drama. "Everything came from that," he says. Parts in Persuasion, Silent Witness, Foyle's War and Clapham Junction followed. He met a girlfriend in the pub on "deaf night", though he is now single. Then Jesus happened. Stafford-Clark's idea was to make a naturalistic drama about the last week in the life of Jesus of Nazareth. It starts with him buying a donkey on the outskirts of Jerusalem so that he can enter the city riding on it, in accordance with prophecies about the coming of the Messiah. There's a documentary feel to the way the drama unfolds. Pilate is trying to keep this troublesome province under control because it's the trade route to Rome for wealth from Syria. Caiaphas doesn't want trouble. And then Jesus arrives to stir up an already explosive situation.

Filming wasn't much fun. It was boiling hot in the Moroccan desert and Mawle's dyslexia and deafness made learning the lines hard. But it was his disability that, in the end, gave him his way into the part. "I came to see Jesus as a modern man who gave time to everybody. He loved humans, he wanted them to excel. When I first got a taste of religion, I thought it was all don't do this or that. As I learnt more about Jesus, I found he had a more positive message: use your gifts."

That thought gave him courage, but still he was often so nervous that he turned for help to David Oyewolo, who played Henry VI for the RSC and is Joseph of Arimathea in The Passion. "He's straight-down-the-line religious and that was very calming. I was getting mixed up with words and so I asked him what it meant to be humble. He said, 'It means asking for help'." Mawle's humility turned out to be his best qualification for the part.

The Passion is on BBC1 on Sunday, 8pm

Further reading: A bold new interpretation of The Passion; Jesus and Judas in one week Holy Week

A bold new interpretation of The Passion

Jesus is a salt-of-the-earth northerner, Mary Magdalene is not a prostitute – oh, and we got the crucifixion all wrong. Welcome to the BBC’s new interpretation of the Passion says Garry Jenkins...

Mid-afternoon in the suffocating heat of the Moroccan desert, and a day that began long before dawn is at last building to its climax. On a ridge, overlooking a rugged, rock-strewn valley, a swarm of make-up artists, costume-fitters and prosthetics experts are applying the finishing touches to the loincloth-clad figure of the actor Joseph Mawle. Nearby, in-between swigs from small bottles of mineral water, a quartet of red-robed Roman centurions is rehearsing hauling upright the crude, T-shaped gibbet to which the young Englishman is about to be attached.

Until now the day has been bedevilled by small technical hitches that have put back filming. Mawle, facing the biggest challenge of his young acting career, portraying Jesus’s crucifixion at Golgotha, has been up since 3am. So when, a few moments later, the last-minute adjustments are complete and the call for quiet and then action finally goes out, the sense of excitement is mixed with a palpable sense of relief. Hundreds of hours of preparation and planning, both here in Morocco and back in the UK, are about to come to fruition. Or so it seems.

Seconds after the cameras turn over for the first time, a sudden gust of desert wind throws thick, red dust up into the eyes of Mawle and the centurions. Within moments tripods, chairs and other bits of equipment are being picked up and thrown over by stinging blasts of air. As all eyes turn heavenwards, a bank of dense, livid, purple and grey clouds is settling above the scene, obscuring even the vast Atlas Mountains in the distance. Soon fat gobbets of rain are turning the dusty landscape a dark, muddy brown, sending everyone running for cover. Minutes later, with the storm growing in intensity, filming is postponed.

At least producer Nigel Stafford-Clark hasn’t lost his desert-dry sense of humour. "There are times when I wonder whether I’ve walked into the Book of Job. This definitely feels more like it belongs in the Old Testament rather than the New one," he says, huddled under a makeshift tent, looking up at the unruly heavens with a world-weary smile. "I do feel like having a conversation with God and saying, ‘Come on, we’re trying to tell this story, give us a break.’"

Stafford-Clark and his team are here in southern Morocco, near the town of Ouarzazate, to film an ambitious new, three-hour version of the Passion, the story of Jesus’s last week on Earth. Despite the fact that it is summer, this is the second time in a week that the production has been thrown by the capricious Moroccan weather. Last week, plans to film Jesus’s arrest by the Romans in the Garden of Gethsemane were wrecked by a sudden and unexpected flash flood. "It was extraordinary. One day this place looked like it hadn’t seen rain for centuries, the next it was submerged in water that was roaring down from the mountains," says Stafford-Clark.

Stoicism is the television producer’s stock in trade, but rarely can it have been required in such quantities. Encounters with biblical storms are far from the first tests Stafford-Clark and his production team have faced. Given the bold, brave and potentially controversial approach they are taking to retelling the story of Jesus’s final days, they are also unlikely to be the last.

The BBC conceived a new version of the Passion, to be broadcast episodically at prime time on BBC1 over four nights through Easter Week, more than a year and a half ago. The appetite for Biblical stories had been proved by the enormous box office success of Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ. Stafford-Clark, who had just brought the acclaimed Bleak House to television in a similar format, sensed an opportunity to breathe new life into the subject.

"I had just watched Pasolini’s Gospel According to St Matthew, which I’d loved when I’d seen it in the Sixties," he says, by now safely installed in his office at the nearby Atlas film studios, which have become his base. "It is the only successful version I’ve seen of this story. The big American epics in the Fifties, and even the Zeffirelli version with Robert Powell back in the Seventies, were all very reverential. They all made you feel as if you were looking at it through a plate glass window, as if there was a distance between you and what was going on," he says. "It always felt like King Arthur or Lord of the Rings, as if these events took place in a vacuum."

Stafford-Clark wanted to ground the story in reality for the first time. "It’s billed as the greatest story ever told and in many ways it is. But in terms of storytelling it never seemed to make a lot of sense. Watching all these other versions, I didn’t understand what Palm Sunday was all about, for instance. He was just a humble preacher from Galilee. Why all this excitement? Why did the high priest react the way he did in condemning Jesus to death? Why did Pilate do what he did? When you are given the story normally, all these things have to be taken for granted. They are part of what you are told. I felt there was a chance to remedy that."

The key, for him, was to create a drama that allows the audience to feel as if they were in the thick of the action 2,000 years ago. "If you had been in Jerusalem in AD32 you would have witnessed this. You would have seen the crowds, the excitement of his arrival, you’d have got wind of what was going on in the temple. And then you’d have heard rumours that he’d been arrested,” he says. “It’s something that actually happened. This is the thing we are trying to get across."

The first challenge was to find a writer capable of evoking the turbulent, chaotic political melting pot that was first-century Judaea. He appeared in the unlikely form of the Emmy-winning, Irish-born writer Frank Deasy, best-known for hard-hitting contemporary dramas like Real Men, about child abuse, and Looking After Jo Jo, set in the world of Scottish drug gangs. Deasy’s fast-moving, episodic script shows the tumultuous events of Passover week in Jerusalem from the perspective of all those who took part in it, not just Jesus and his disciples, but Pontius Pilate, the Romans and the Jewish temple authorities too. "As a dramatist, the big challenge was to evoke a world in which this story has not taken place, a world without Jesus or any Christian churches or any of the Christian concepts that are so familiar to us," he explains.

As well as reading the Gospels and conducting his own research, Deasy spoke to Professor Mark Goodacre, a leading New Testament scholar at Duke University in North Carolina, who was engaged as a historical consultant to the series. It allowed him to add dramatic depth – and potentially controversy – to the orthodox version of the story. Deasy was determined that every character had a story of his or her own. "By the end I hope people feel they have been on a very deep journey with these characters, that they feel they have shared the most powerful week of their life. So everyone had to have a motive that we could understand, a logical psychology to the things that they do," he explains.

As a result, for instance, Mary Magdalene, played by Paloma Baeza, is portrayed not as a prostitute but as a woman who is, effectively, one of Jesus’s sponsors. "There is increasing evidence that she was a wealthy widow who supported Jesus’s campaign. As he emerged from Galilee, he needed backing," says Deasy.

Pontius Pilate, played by James Nesbitt, is also revealed in a new light, as a career soldier posted to one of the most troublesome outposts of the Roman Empire. "We see him as a man with a wife and a career and a villa in Rome to worry about," says Deasy. "Again I wanted his decisions to be plausible. He’s a guy managing a career and a volatile political situation. I think Pilate is an interesting contemporary figure. You can almost view the current situation with the Western powers in Iraq or Afghanistan in the things Pilate says. He is someone who is dealing with people with huge convictions about things that mean very little to him and he is trying to impose order," he says.

The character who emerges from the shadows of history most strongly in this version of the story is the high priest of Jerusalem’s temple, Caiaphas. In most versions of the story the man who condemns Jesus to death at the hands of the Romans is a one-dimensional figure, the most identifiable bad guy. Through his research, however, Deasy began to see a man who was part priest, part politician, a leader who was faced with keeping a lid on the cauldron of intrigue and insurrection that was Jerusalem during the biggest festival of the year, Passover. So when Jesus appears in Jerusalem, fulfilling an ancient prophesy that the Messiah will arrive on a donkey through the city’s eastern gate, Deasy’s Caiaphas, played by Ben Daniels, is motivated not by bloodlust, but by the need to protect his people from the violence the Romans routinely meted out when tensions rose within the city. "I became more and more fascinated by Caiaphas," Deasy says. "He is usually a cartoon villain. But he is trying to protect his world for noble reasons. He loves his people and his family. By going down a very human route with Caiaphas it led me into really interesting dramatic territory."

At the heart of the drama, of course, is Jesus himself. Like Stafford-Clark, Deasy wanted to move away from the image of an otherwordly figure. "In so many other treatments Jesus is pure, floating on a cloud 2ft above the ground," he says. "He has to emerge as a person to other living people."

The key to this was giving him a voice that was rooted in the world, something Deasy found in an unexpected place. "I was struggling, so I talked to a friend of mine who is a priest. Every day he makes these concepts fresh to a contemporary audience so I asked him how he did it. He gave me a really simple piece of advice," he explains. "He said to think of Jesus as coming from Newcastle, as a working-class man from the north of Palestine who speaks Aramaic to fishermen and peasants, who comes to London where people speak Hebrew and are more educated. And he starts to preach the Gospel. He has got to use words that are quite simple, clear and rough at times. He has to explain concepts like redemption, righteousness, forgiveness, in plain, everyday language. This idea of Jesus coming from a real place worked. After that I found a voice for him that was easy and conversational, simple, without being patronising."

Perhaps the boldest decision Deasy made was the last one. The final episode of the six-part drama depicts the resurrection of Jesus in a way that is open to individual interpretation. In keeping with the Gospels, he reappears to his former friends in different ways, leaving them to decide what it is they have seen.

"A lot of accounts skip the resurrection," Deasy says. "We have followed the different gospel accounts faithfully. There are lengthy discussions among the disciples about what it means. They are the conversations we would have today in the light of an event like that. It resolves itself in that there is a resurrection of hope among the disciples. There’s a sense of new life, that suffering has been transformed into something meaningful. The extent of what that means as a viewer is up to you."

While Deasy was completing his script, Stafford-Clark was turning his attention to filming. When he decided to shoot in Morocco during summer, director Michael Offer thought he was crazy. "The old phrase about mad dogs and Englishmen sprang to mind," laughs the Australian director. "The heat has been challenging, particularly for the actors wearing beards and robes."

The Atlas film studios have been a favourite location for film-makers from David Lean to Ridley Scott, who filmed sequences for Gladiator here. Every aspect of The Passion’s look was carefully researched. For instance, production designer Simon Elliott and his team went to great lengths to ensure that the last supper was an authentic meal from the Judaea of the time. "The Passover lamb eaten during the festival would be part of the meal, along with herbs and green vegetables," says Elliott. "There were dates and raisins and unleavened bread and a sausage made of honey and dates."

In a similar vein, Elliott and his team tried to recreate the crucifixion as realistically as possible. Historical evidence suggests that Jesus would have been nailed to the cross in a way that is at odds with the image that has dominated Christian iconography for 2,000 years. "There has only ever been one archaeological find of a crucified skeleton, in Palestine in the Sixties," explains Elliott. "The body was in a slightly different position to the classic one, with the legs tucked up and under. Historians think it shows the crucifixion was fiendishly designed. If you could bear the pain of having the nails driven through your ankles you could take the weight and lift up your chest. But if you were put in a position where you couldn’t lift yourself up you died of asphyxia – you were basically suffocated. That’s the reason they broke your legs, so you would very quickly suffocate."

If the burden of retelling the greatest story ever told was heavy for the production team, however, it was greater still for the man chosen to portray Jesus. A relatively little known actor, acclaimed for his work in the BBC2 drama Soundproof and most recently seen in the gay drama Clapham Junction, Joseph Mawle was Stafford-Clark and Offer’s first choice for the role. He admits he has found it hard and lonely work. "It is incredibly daunting," he says. "It is in some ways the biggest role you can take on. There were times I got quite shaky about it and thought, I’m really scared, to be quite honest with you. If we don’t like Jesus, then we are in trouble."

The key, he says, has been to play him as flesh and blood. "He was a man. No two ways about it. The only way I could approach him was not as a god, but as a man," he says. He has, he admits, been particularly wary of the crucifixion scene. "I am pretty scared about it. I want to get it as right as possible, to play the reality as much as possible and to tell the story as best as possible."

Frustratingly, however, he will not be doing it today. As word comes through that filming has been abandoned for the day, Mawle heads off to begin preparing to film an interior scene at the studios.

Nigel Stafford-Clark, meanwhile, is in his office, anticipating battles much further down the line. Aware of the scrutiny that the film will get, both here and in the US where the BBC’s co-financier, HBO, will show the drama, he has already begun dialogue with the Christian community. "We have told them what we are doing," he says. "It’s very important that it doesn’t come as a shock to people, particularly to those for whom it is the most important story in their lives. The reaction has been very positive."

He is too old and wise a hand to expect it to avoid controversy completely. When he made Bleak House he had to field complaints from the Dickens Society and, faced with a rather broader constituency this time, he is braced for criticism again. He is unapologetic about the approach he and his team have taken, however. "My job is telling stories. The fact that it is the backbone of one of the world’s great religions is what, for me, has stopped it being told properly as a story before because people back away from it. It’s not just a story that is told in churches. It really happened," he says.

"Our version is not remotely controversial. There is no attempt to twist anything – you don’t see Jesus sleeping with Mary Magdalene or anything like that. We have tried to make it feel like it is really happening. And because you understand why people are behaving the way they are, what Jesus is doing becomes even more extraordinary."

"With the world the way it is at the moment," he continues, "anything that is about something that goes beyond your everyday existence is of value. People are looking for something beyond their new car. Telling a story like this quenches that thirst. It makes you feel there is something beyond your own limited existence."

And with that he leaves his office to head back out towards the set – checking nervously for the arrival of another Biblical storm.

The Passion begins on BBC1 on Sunday, March 16, and continues throughout Easter week

Further reading: A new passion;