The most moving rendition of Amazing Grace?

No it’s not Spock’s funeral at the end of Wrath of Khan.

The most expressive use of the hymn Amazing Grace ever film was in an episode of Cheers originally broadcast on the 25th May, 1984. The episode was called “Coach buries a Grudge”.

Spock’s funeral, lest we forget, involves Scottie playing the tune on the bagpipes. There is no reference to John Newton’s actual words.

Coach, on the other hand, has his own relationship with the words of the hymn. The Coach, you will remember, was the elderly bartender whose sense of consecutive logic has been eroded by too many baseballs to the head over too long a period. He is delightful. He is incapable of malice or bitterness. Almost.

In this episode, a big memorial celebration for the life of his old baseball comrade “T Bone” is planned for the bar. Sam remembers T Bone and dislikes him and unfortunately Coach overhears Sam explaining to Diane that Sam recalls T Bone hitting on Coach’s wife. Coach collapses in a new form of grief. He goes from grieving his friend to grieving the love he now feels was wasted on this man. It’s a different form of overlapping grief. He is torn up inside.

Coach is determined to expose T Bone at his own memorial. He starts by saying “T-Bone Scarpiggione was a son of…. a son of… ” choking up several times before continuing “T-Bone Scarpiggione was a son of an immigrant. And like most immigrants, he was a human being.” (This line got a laugh in 1984 – in the terrifying and disgusting year of 2024 in which fascists seem to be winning everywhere such a joke would not be risked.) It is then revealed that T Bone variously hurt and wounded everyone present. There is a sudden stampede to hang T Bone in effigy – to suspend his cardboard cutout from the highest yardarm in Boston harbour.

Diane leaps to the vacant podium and starts singing “Amazing Grace”. The would be lynch mob is checked and slowly reassemble in the bar to join in.

No final joke. Closing titles.

It takes a very funny show to survive this kind of sentimentality. This is sentimentality done right. The show has earned the right to jerk tears from us having (by 1984) delivered consistent and unsentimental laughs for two years.

The show declares, in the least dogmatic or sectarian terms possible, that vile, treacherous, libidinous T Bone is not beyond Divine grace. There is a higher love that can embrace and reclaim even T Bone. And within this knowledge of T Bone’s possible redemption there is a communality, a turning inward that is simultaneously a turning outward and the fact that it is impossible to separate one’s own need for forgiveness from the imperative to forgive others.

Coach cannot articulate such theology, but he knows the words to the hymn. The hymn flows through him. The words are not his but he’s an intuitively happy conduit.

(It is rather shocking to be reminded of the fact that these words were first set to the tune we all know by a southern baptist called Walker in the 1850s for the benefit of an all white congregation near Charleston SC. Yes – the first people to sing the hymn as we know it would have all been passionately pro slavery.)