YOU have to laugh at BBC2's Tuesday evening series A Country Parish.

It is an eight-part docutainment about a young clergyman who has just moved from a smart suburban parish in Nuneaton to a rural village in deepest Wiltshire. The series has a strong storyline, rather like a soap-opera.

Why do I say you have to laugh? Well, because the young vicar spent most of the first programme telling us that he was not at all like "the stereotype vicar". We know what he meant by this: he meant that he did not see himself as a rather old-fashioned, slightly bumbling figure, with a knowledge of Latin and Greek and a broad dog-collar under his tweed jacket; a clergyman with perhaps a hint of the sonorous parsonical voice who drops in on his parishioners for tea and scones and treats himself, and his house-servant, every evening, after he has dressed for dinner, to a small glass of sherry.

I've got news for the young clergyman in that TV programme: the image of the vicar I've just outlined hasn't been a stereotype for 50 years. Actually, though this will come as a nasty shock to our trendy young clergyman on A Country Parish, he himself is the new stereotype. He is the very model of the stereotypical modern clergyman right down to his tattoos. He talks in the playschool baby language, in which such experiences as he is capable of having, he describes as "scary" and "awesome" - in the non-religious sense. We saw him "preaching" to his Nuneaton congregation with the aid of the sort of props a conjurer would use at an infants' party.

The first week's episode of A Country Parish ended with a trailer for what's to come. We are promised that the new young vicar will upset the fox hunters in his village and get on the wrong side of traditionalists when he introduces new forms of services into the church. What, not a stereotype! The man is a walking, talking clich of today's parson right down to his perpetual silly grin and his knee-jerk repudiation of the past.

What, you may ask, would a non-stereotypical vicar be like? He would be in favour of the war on Saddam Hussein. He might be warning his congregation about the danger that unchecked groups of asylum seekers may harbour terrorists. He might join the fox hunters. As an intelligent, cultured and, above all, patriotic Englishman, he would surely be against the bureaucratic trappings of the EU. He would certainly not use the new Noddy church service books, but instead he would conduct his services according to The Book of Common Prayer and The King James Bible.

Instead of shiftily mocking the cricketers on the village green, he might apply to play for them. He would conduct a traditional country harvest festival and go shooting with the farmers in his parish. He would also certainly believe - unlike so many of his modern colleagues - in the Virgin Birth and Resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ and in the miracle stories of the New Testament.

The problem with the new stereotyped modern clergyman is that his way of running the parish has resulted in the biggest desertion of the pews ever.

* Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael's, Cornhill, in the City of London, and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange.