From hanging out with George Clooney and Princess Diana to making a terrible faux pas with billionaire Bill Gates, the pop star turned vicar Richard Coles gives Event chapter and verse on his extremely quirky parish life

The Reverend Richard Coles first found fame with Eighties pop band The Communards, whose hit Don’t Leave Me This Way became the biggest-selling single of 1986.

Today he is best known as the presenter of Radio 4’s morning magazine programme Saturday Live – which attracts two million listeners – and as a regular contributor to Pause For Thought on the Chris Evans Radio 2 breakfast show.

Richard Coles with his dogs at St Mary the Virgin, Finedon

His day job, however, is as vicar of St Mary the Virgin, Finedon, Northamptonshire (he was the inspiration for Tom Hollander’s character in the BBC2 sitcom Rev). He revealed in his 2014 memoir Fathomless Riches how he enjoyed sex with strangers in car parks, took drugs and lied about having HIV.

Today, he lives in a celibate civil partnership with his partner the Rev David Coles (né Oldham).

In his new book, Bringing In The Sheaves, from which we print exclusive extracts here, Coles draws on his 11 years in the clergy, with all the humour, quirky characters and incidents that life – and death – serve up.

WELL THAT TOLD ME

I’m sitting at my desk in my study. The phone rings. Someone has called to tell me a parishioner is dying and would I go to see him?

When I arrive the man is in and out of lucidity. I talk to him but I am not sure if he understands much or anything of what I say.

I anoint him with holy oil and he seems to respond to that, to stir a little, so I sit beside him for a while and read to him from the Psalms.

Onstage with Jimmy Somerville in The Communards in 1985;

After a while he seems to wake almost, and taking this as encouragement I carry on until we reach the great Psalm 130, De Profundis: ‘Out of the deep have I called unto thee, O Lord; Lord, hear my voice’.

He stirs again and tries I think to say something, so I pull my chair up closer. He looks at me and with a great effort says, ‘Shut up you stupid t***.’

MY SHIRLEY BASSEY MOMENT

When I presided at the Eucharist for the first time, after my ordination to the priesthood in 2005 at St Botolph’s Church in Boston, Lincolnshire, I wore a special chasuble – the long poncho a priest wears at the altar – made for the occasion, in wild scarlet silk with a hanging orphrey [embroidery].

As I processed down the nave I overheard one church warden, a solid Lincolnshire type, say to another, ‘He looks like Shirley Bassey.’

Richard with Saturday Live cohost Aasmah Mir

After Boston I went to be curate at St Paul’s Church, Knightsbridge, in west London. I was licensed and installed as 59th Vicar of St Mary the Virgin, Finedon, in Northamptonshire, in 2011. Once, I was in the front garden when a lady peered over the fence. ‘Are you the new chap?’ she asked. I said I was. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘we thought you were black.’ I wondered why. ‘We thought you were in The Commodores.’ (Coles’s band was The Communards.)

That same year I became a co-presenter of Saturday Live. I stay in a hotel round the corner from New Broadcasting House on Friday nights, leaving at 6.30am for work.

In the office we sign off the scripts, gossip, and then at 8.30am Aasmah Mir, my co-presenter, and I go to the Today studio on the third floor.

They are approaching the end of their programme and there is usually a demob-happy atmosphere, which suits the tone of our visit to trail what’s coming up in half an hour on Saturday Live.

Care must be taken not to sound too breezy if the news is especially bad that day, or if there is a big interview to follow.

Several times I have alerted listeners to a lady from the bat protection league, or a man dressed up as Henry VIII, or a soap star’s live confessions, while the Chancellor of the Exchequer, sitting next to me, pores over a page of scribbled calculations...

EVERYTHING IS BRILLIANT

In corporate life, I have noticed, it is getting harder and harder to say that things are bad. I was once sent on a ‘half-day seminar’, as it was ominously called, with a BBC bigwig.

A group of us from across the organisation spent the morning being told how marvellous everything was, and how exciting were the challenges that faced us.

Coles with Jimmy Somerville in The Communards in 1987;

The seminar concluded with a rather breathless speech from a young apparatchik from Corporate Affairs, intended to raise morale and get us fully on board with the new regime. Any questions? There was silence until a veteran reporter from the back said, ‘Why don’t you f*** off, Tinker Bell?’

At the BBC we often gather in ‘Del Boy’, one of the meeting rooms in New Broadcasting House named after the Corporation’s comedy greats, for the Saturday Live Friday meeting.

We go through what’s on the following day’s programme while around us, semi- visible through semi-opaque glass walls, other BBC people are in meetings.

Once a group of stern-looking managers broke into a chorus of Bring Me Sunshine when they noticed that they were in ‘Morecambe and Wise’, and two of them did that funny skip with the hand gestures round the table.

GOOD EVANS, IT'S GEORGE!

I am in early to do Pause For Thought on the Chris Evans breakfast show. You can always tell the star wattage on the show by the number of autograph collectors gathered round the door.

Coles with Radio 2 DJ and Event columnist Chris Evans

Inside Chris is sitting behind the desk talking to a man with an improbably gravelly voice.

Another man, looking like he had got up for this too early, is sitting in his hat and coat.

As I sit down I say hello to the man in the hat and coat and he says ‘Hello, Sir’ in reply.

It’s only after I’ve done my piece that I realise it was George Clooney.

RETURN OF THE LUFTWAFFE

At St Botolph’s, or Boston Stump, as it’s known, I once saw an old man walking around on his own looking nostalgic, so I introduced myself and asked if he’d visited before.

Not exactly, he replied, in accented English, but it was a place of happy memories.

He’d been in the Luftwaffe during the war, a bomber pilot, and on the return leg of a raid when they saw the tower of the Stump they knew they were heading out to the North Sea and to safety.

Richard with his partner, David

I wondered what drew him back to Boston Stump. Was he seeking forgiveness of some kind? And if he was would we be capable of giving it?

LET US KRAY

Betty, who comes to morning prayer, tells me that she had been a nurse during the war at the London Hospital and lived in the East End where she was adopted by a family.

But she could never understand why the mother of the household never had to queue when she went to the butcher, or why people went suddenly quiet when her twin boys, Ronnie and Reggie, turned up to help out with the shopping.

CELEBRITY WHINGERS

When I was curate at St Paul’s, every Advent we hosted carol services for the big charities.

Princess Diana. I met her, precisely, twice – once with a semi-circle of others at a charity auction at Christie’s, and once at the London Lighthouse, of which we were both patrons

The celebrities would arrive early to run through their readings and my job was to take them to the Vicarage for a glass of champagne and a pee before they were shown to the front pew.

One year one of them cornered me and complained that his reading was not the ‘King James Version’ that he preferred.

What we had given him to read actually was the ‘King James Version’, or Authorised Version as it is properly known here, but I just adopted my ‘how interesting’ face, partly because there were more pressing matters, partly because he and I had form, which I had remembered and he had forgotten, form which had for an inglorious period exposed him to public ridicule and in which I was involved.

Did any memory of that stir within him? I do not think so, and he read, sonorously, the ‘King James Version’ which I pretended to have photocopied but actually just handed him back the page he had given me to change.

GETTING SNAPPY WITH HER MAJESTY

The Queen is on a visit to Broadcasting House. I watch her arrive, and am struck by the eerie silence.

The last time I saw her arrive somewhere was at the Royal Academy of Music, when I was chaplain, and everyone clapped and cheered as she emerged.

The silence now does not indicate the decline of popularity, but the rise of new technology, smartphones, which people hold up, making clapping impossible.

Richard on Celebrity Masterchef earlier this year

It is more important to capture the moment on your phone than to greet the Lord’s anointed. I wonder if she notices?

We have a special guest on the programme the following day: Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft. The other guest with us round the table calls him, respectfully, Mr Gates, while we call him, in line with the programme’s temper and our correspondence with his office, Bill. Once, when his fellow guest’s ‘Mr Gates’ is followed by my ‘Bill’, he looks up, for a second, and I feel a frisson of lèse-majesté.

DIANA AND ME

After Christmas I go to stay with a friend in Staffordshire. At dinner that evening we are talking about the glitter of bling, and the glamour of power, and the mystique of royalty, and how that works today, if at all. Princess Diana comes up, who seemed to me to be both self-deprecating and slightly embarrassed by her status and yet use it to the full when it suited her.

I had known her slightly (our acquaintanceship couldn’t have been much slighter) and went on to say something about the Panorama interview she gave as her marriage to the Prince of Wales disintegrated. Then my friend says, ‘I know so many people who claim to have known her, people who met her on the charity circuit… of course, they didn’t know her at all.’ I say, evenly, ‘Yes, that’s how I knew her,’ and he says, ‘I guess she had a knack for making you feel that she was sharing intimacies with you, when they weren’t really intimacies at all.’

‘Yes,’ I say, ‘That’s right.’

But he’s right about Princess Diana. I met her, precisely, twice – once with a semi-circle of others at a charity auction at Christie’s, and once at the London Lighthouse, of which we were both patrons, when I was talking to her stepbrother and she came over to say hello. Funny, friendly, but covered in diamonds, which flashed as she entered the room like tiny strobes.

THE WORST NEWS AT THE WORST TIME

I am just going to bed when the phone rings. It’s a parishioner, telling me that her husband, whom I had seen in hospital the day before, is not looking good and the family has been called in. ‘Do you want me to come?’ I ask. I take the things I need and drive to Kettering General, so tired I nearly get hit by a lorry on the A14. At the hospital I say a prayer. A nurse comes in and says they are going to be some time so I tell the family I will be back in a few minutes and go to see Dad, who is dying in the room directly opposite.

Two days later, just as I am about to give a speech to a WI meeting, a text from David [Coles’s partner] arrives to tell me that my father has died. I go on stage and do my piece and at the end someone talks to me about her bereavement while I keep my own to myself until I’m driving home on the coldest night of the year, worrying I might skid and then I say out loud: ‘Daddy, my daddy’ like Jenny Agutter in The Railway Children.

HATCHING...

I first met David at a parish not far from Boston. It was the first day of the new smoking ban [July 1, 2007]. Inside, I caught sight of a young man, handsome, in the congregation. As the altar was being cleared, he introduced himself as David, a member of the Parish Church Council. On an impulse I asked if he had a fag – he gave me his last one. We stood outside, me in a cassock, smoking on a roastingly hot day.

Four years later, he and I were living together in Wymondham.

I am not sure if you can renew a baptismal vow but that is what David and I did when we took our party of pilgrims from Finedon to the Holy Land, to a bend in the River Jordan, in the waters where Jesus received the baptism of John 2,000 years ago.

Reggie and Ronnie Kray. Betty, who comes to morning prayer, tells me that she had been a nurse during the war at the London Hospital and lived in the East End where she was adopted by a family, which turned out to be the Krays

At the riverside, some enthusiastic Americans were robing in white and undergoing total immersion. At the gift shop where we bought ice creams, they bought T-shirts with what looked like jokey slogans until you saw them close up. I saw a young man wearing one which showed a pregnant woman in a hijab in a rifle’s sights, the crosshairs meeting over her pregnant belly. The slogan said, ‘One shot, two kills’.

Sometimes I loathe religion. I loathe it when it is adopted as a cosmic justification for a political agenda that needs to turn its vices into virtues and its violence into crusade or jihad.

...MATCHING

A wedding enquiry at St Paul’s Knightsbridge. She is shy and foreign, he a big, gruff Scot. They want the wedding as late as possible and I explain that we have to be done by six and that is a problem because their reception venue is not available until seven. I ask where it is and they say ‘The V&A’, and I suggest they ask again because it shouldn’t be too much trouble to open the restaurant.

‘It’s not in the restaurant,’ he says. Where then? I ask. ‘We’ve booked the whole thing.’

They invite me to the reception, which is as splendid as anything I’ve seen, and when the band come on I think they sound like Snow Patrol until someone tells me they are Snow Patrol.

We had no guests at ours because being involved in big weddings puts you off them, or it does me, and besides I rather like the municipal feel of a civil partnership. The ceremony, about as romantic as applying for a TV licence, took about ten minutes and then we went to the pub.

...AND DISPATCHING

A cremation at Mortlake so the funeral directors offered to pick me up at St Paul’s and drive me there. When it arrived it was the van, or the Private Ambulance, as it is coyly called, which picks up bodies from hospitals. It was driven by one of the most taciturn members of that profession, a tall Jamaican of few words who I rather liked. He nodded hello and we sat in agreeable silence until he said, ‘Jeremy Beadle?’

I said, ‘Yes?’

There was a pause.

‘Him in de back.’

And that’s how I found out about the untimely death of television’s favourite prankster.

BEAM HER UP SCOTTY

I was in the gym when I saw on the telly that Mo Mowlam had died. Mo was that rarest of things, a genuinely loved politician. I had become friendly with her and her husband Jon in the Nineties.

I called Jon with condolences and he asked me to conduct Mo’s funeral, but with no religious element if that was something I could do. I didn’t need to think to say yes, and the components of it were entirely up to her and Jon.

The day before the funeral Jon showed me letters of condolence he’d received, a generous one from Gordon Brown (terrible crabby writing in thick felt-tip), lovely ones from Prince Charles and Madeleine Albright, and a sober typed note from ELIZABETH R.

The crem staff were helpful and showed me the buttons and stuff I needed to know, including Button 2, which made a bright light shine on the coffin, growing in intensity and then going out as the curtain curled round the catafalque. A bit showbiz, I said, and they said ‘Yeah, we call it the Beam Me Up, Scotty’.