BBC 2 Saturday 22nd March

View on iPlayer in the UK here until 29th March.

There’s something fascinating about the Shroud of Turin. Not, from a personal perspective, because I believe that it’s the burial cloth of Jesus, but because it tells us a lot about the way that particular objects are revered by the Christian faith and how this reverence comes into being. The Shroud is probably the most interesting of any of these objects. It supposedly has a direct connection to Christ; it has a history that we know stretches back to the 12th Century; and, of course, it’s come into direct contact with modern science when it was carbon-dated 20 years ago.

This documentary showed promise. It aimed to show, from a scientific perspective, the history of the shroud, and potentially why the carbon tests might need to be redone give us more information to make a decision about what this object is. To be fair, there’s a lot of facts in this documentary which are interesting, and can give a perspective on the shroud that has not been made clear before.

However, this documentary falls down in the way that so many previous religious/scientific documentaries fall. That science is there to be disproved, and, essentially, once you have disproved (or potentially disproved) a scientific hypothesis, that the only explanation left must be that found in the bible or in the church. The fact is that such a fanciful hypothesis of the Shroud being that of Christ with the image being that of Christ’s face is an extraordinary claim, and that requires extraordinary evidence to prove it. The evidence in this documentary, interesting though it might be, was nowhere near extraordinary enough to back up the religious claims made throughout. There is far too much reliance on biblical stories which themselves are open to question, and from other sources that themselves are not what you’d call of the highest historical veracity. To be fair, the documentary never quite leaps to any conclusions about the shroud’s origins, but it really does seem to have set out to prove the shroud is real, or at least to disprove any evidence that suggests it’s not.

However, the more information that we can find out about the shroud, the more interesting the story becomes, so I have no problem with a documentary that teaches me more, even if the presentation and assumptions are not what I would expect from a real, scientific programme. I expected more from a scientific documentary, but what I didn’t take into account is that making a scientific programme about such an iconic object is nigh-on impossible, and that, in itself, is perhaps the most interesting thing this documentary has to teach us.