So what did the actress really say to the vicar, when given free rein? Well, just like most groups of strangers, the group started off talking about each other's jobs, with Aled explaining his work in raising issues of conscience such as the plight of asylum seekers with AMs, and the actresses talking about how they hoped to challenge young people's perceptions through thought-provoking art. Zoe, meanwhile, caused a few surprises when she innocently piped up, "I played Metallica in a service and a few people walked out. I also played Sinead O'Connor, Evanescence and Depeche Mode all at the one service. The staff loved it but the students weren't up for it." The four seemed to hold a united front on a range of issues including asylum and immigration and culture. And nowhere was this unanimity truer than when the conversation turned to reality TV. Aled: Do you get frustrated that your industry might get driven towards banality all the time? Carri: Very simply, I loathe reality TV. It's the absolute decline of television. Certain sections of the population are becoming zombified. Zoe: It's a lazy vision. It allcomes back to 'someone else is doing it so I don't have to'. Carri: Is this a reflection of what we want? I was raging against Big Brother the other day and the person I was talking to said it was because we're nosy and years ago we would have been interested in what was happening in the village. Anna: We nose into people's lives because we haven't got it in our communities. Zoe: We don't communicate with our neighbours any more. Carri: The media is so powerful and I was talking to an aid worker and I asked for his view of the tsunami thing. He said it was terrible but it meant that all the cameras were trained onto Asia while people were dying every day all over the world. Zoe: It is always about what's reported - with the numbers of Britons and Americans dead first. Carri: The flipside of that is I see the media and arts as two separate routes Aled: The issue for me, and I'm trying to avoid a fundamentalist tag here, is I find what's missing is the truth of a given scenario or situation. I was listening to Question Time yesterday and it seems to me that rather than grappling with the truth of where we are, what we're doing is creating things and people to fear rather than understand. In the past theatre has played an important role in challenging. Carri: I think there's a lot of people in spiritual crisis in this country and you can argue the arts reflect that. What are people making theatre about at the moment?
