Vernon Sproxton, religious broadcaster and theologian, born May 8, 1920, died September 1996.

VERNON Sproxton, who died last Monday at the age of 76, was one of the most influential, but underrated figures in religious broadcasting.

Although the child of a Methodist mother and Anglican father, he felt called to the ministry of the Congregational Church of England, whose sturdy independence matched his own.

He studied first at Edinburgh University and then at the Congregational College in Bradford, before being ordained in Leeds, and working for four years with the Student Christian Movement, then in the 1940s in its heyday. (It was at an SCM meeting as a student that he met his

wife, Margaret, with whom

he recently celebrated his golden wedding anniversary.) Although employed by the SCM, he acted as minister to a Congregational Church outside Blackburn before being called to be the full-time minister of one near Liverpool.

In 1957 he joined the BBC, originally to produce programmes for the Light Programme, but his intellectual gifts, literary bent, and theological insights soon led him to contribute to the Third Programme and the Home Service, and then to embark

on a career as a producer

of distinguished television programmes.

He was most at home exploring the thinking of the great figures of twentieth-century religious thought and, at a time when religious faith was assumed to be of little interest to very many, most of the ablest and most controversial religious figures in Britain and and Europe made their way on to the television screen through programmes which Vernon Sproxton produced; Karl Barth, Emil Brunner, Simone Weil, Reinhold Neibuhr, John Robinson.

He was one of the first in the field of religious broadcasting to grasp the sensitivities of television production. ``When I was doing an interview with Karl Barth,'' he once said, ``I could not use a big close-up because the viewers' attention would have been seduced by the hair growing out of his ears.''

The 1960s was the era of the closed period, the religious ghetto between 6pm and 7.30pm, but Vernon Sproxton was someone passionately committed to establishing a place for religious broadcasting outside the ``God slot''. And he recognised very early on that not only religious broadcasting but the Christian faith would survive and flourish only if it avoided artificial protectionism and competed with the best of secular broadcasting.

``One of the greatest

obstacles to our work,'' he once told a conference of religious broadcasters and church leaders, ``comes from the protected space, and the protected person, locked away through no fault of his own behind the protective barrier. Religious television should become more secular, and I should personally become immersed in and operate in the medium as effectively as I know how.''

However, he recognised an overtly religious dimension to his work. He once spoke about coming back from filming with 20 tons of film, library footage, miles of tape, the whole plethora of material, and wondering whether he could ever recapture the programme he had originally envisaged. ``It is no use sitting on your behind, waiting for the vision to come back, because it only comes back when you begin to handle the material; the problem is to recover the vision. Without wishing to be blasphemous, this stage strongly reminds me of a sacrament: `This do to bring me back again'.''

But Sproxton's wholehearted commitment to the standards of secular television did not meet with approval from his masters at the BBC, and he thought his programmes were denied the funding they required, so he took early retirement from the BBC in the mid-1970s and soon afterwards left Walton-on-Thames (where, characteristically he had been minister to a local congregation in his ``spare'' time, and retired to Tunstall in his native Yorkshire. For 10 years he presented radio coverage of the General Assembly (most of them in tandem with myself) and in recent years he was a much-loved and welcome visiting preacher in Canonmills Baptist Church in Edinburgh.

Vernon Sproxton was a very serious, but never a solemn, man. Andrew Barr, Head of Religious Broadcasting for BBC Scotland, describes him as someone whose face bore the imprint of the painful issues which presented themselves to twentieth-century Christianity. Certainly he had little time for facile or trite expressions of religiosity. There are many, not least myself, who owe him much and will miss him deeply.

Vernon Sproxton is survived by his widow, Margaret, his children, David and Ruth. His son Andrew died several years ago.