I'm sure that there are people out there who have never heard of Phil Mitchell, or even Eastenders, the TV soap opera in which he was a character. Of course, what I would have liked to have discussed was just how much of the news is less crucial fact than manipulated fiction. But as Thought for the Day was embedded in the news, such subversive ideas had to be left to implication.

We’ve had murders and manslaughters, bombs in the Middle East, America and China on the brink of war, Foot and Mouth, an outbreak of TB, Election speculation and an Interest Rate Cut. Yet for weeks now, it seems there’s been just one news item on everybody’s lips. Who shot Phil Mitchell, and now we know. Well - Maybe.

It is fiction, after all, and in fiction you can re-direct a story at any time to suit the ratings. And what ratings. How many producers of news and current affairs are green with envy at the thought of those twenty-million plus viewers. It seems that the real world just can’t compete.

Why is it that so many seem to consider fictional events more important than factual? Is it because the news can seem so remote from our lives, mostly facts that don’t affect us personally, and over which we have no influence? And if we are unable to influence events, what use is the news except as a different kind of fiction in which to look for some universality that reflects our own lives.

We try to get familiar with the central players and endow  them with rounded and interesting characters, but news is about celebrated people not punters, so it can be hard to feel real empathy. When popular fiction comments on issues of note, however, it dresses them with human faces and sets them in a life context familiar to the greatest number possible. That’s what stories need to be lasting and popular.

Few items of daily news last long, news is temporal by nature. And popular culture only lasts a little longer, usually for a generation or so. But there are some stories that we have treasured for centuries, the words of the Prophets, with an eternal relevance to humanity, like the words of the Qur’an which are integral to the whole pattern of muslim lives.

Qur’an says:

“In their stories is surely a lesson to men possessed of minds; it is not a forged story, but a confirmation of what is before it, and a distinguishing of everything, and a guidance, and a mercy, to a people who believe.”