114: David Cheetham

Nostalgia Interviews with Chris Deacy

My guest this week is Professor David Cheetham, Professor of Philosophical Theology at the University of Birmingham where he has been based since 1999.

David and I were both Theology students at Lampeter, with David studying for his PhD at the time that I was an undergraduate, and David talks about how Lampeter influenced him – and how there was more going on than his academic achievements.

We talk about the second nature element of Zoom and how it has affected our teaching and we learn why David is an optimist about life post-lockdown.

We discuss his memories of living in Lampeter back in the days when you ‘had to make your own entertainment’ in a way that wouldn’t have happened in a city university and why Lampeter was like a self-contained ecosystem of people in which he didn’t have to worry about ‘tomorrow’.

We learn all about the legendary Edmund Estafan and the Mydroilyn Sound Machine where David was the band’s keyboardist and David reveals that he had originally wanted to be a musician and that despite ostensibly going there to read Theology Lampeter enabled him to become a musician. He also recalls his ritual of running over to the local Chinese takeaway for 11pm.

David recalls growing up in the 1980s in what was a very musical world and that he once told the Revd. Richard Coles that ‘Don’t Leave Me This Way’ by The Communards was the first song he danced to at the Lampeter union disco.

David is not the first person I’ve interviewed who has written a PhD on John Hick (see my interview in 2019 with Gerard Loughlin). He talks about meeting John Hick at his home in Birmingham over a strong sherry and David recounts an hilarious story about how he once had a clash between a Blend Band rehearsal and seeing John Hick give a talk.

We learn about how David doesn’t necessarily agree with everything Hick has written and he tells us why Hick was worried about how Death and Eternal Life would be perceived, before moving on to talk about Paul Badham’s influence (on his both) and his defence of dualism.

We learn what David’s younger self would have expected him to do and how one of his secondary school teachers thought he was a bit too ambitious when he said at the age of about 14 that he wanted to be a Professor one day.

We discuss whether our university tutors could ever have known what we got up to outside of our work and at the end of the interview we discover why David has a ‘good nostalgia’ about what he has done in his life to date.

Please note: Opinions expressed are solely those of Chris Deacy and David Cheetham and do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of the University of Kent.