- This season, there is a secret about Alphy Geordie's kind of secretly always known about.
He asked in series nine, "What's your secret?"
- Love child?
Mm?
Tragic past?
The vicars I've known, they've all had something.
- Okay.
My dad's an accountant.
Mum's a housewife.
I'm pretty good at football.
Terrible at maths.
And that's about it.
- He has made up this story, which he's told everyone, but it's not true.
It's a coverup that he tells people because he finds it easier that way.
No one asks him questions.
And I think there's a bit of shame from Alphy for being an orphan.
And he kind of has this facade of, you know, just being this clean cut guy with his nice red Triumph.
And actually, he's had a really hard life.
He's grown up in an orphanage.
- What is this?
- This is this where I grew up, Geordie.
This is the man who raised me.
- The way Geordie reacts is not, "Why did you lie to me all those months and years?
You didn't have to.
I'm your friend.
I'm part of your family."
(melancholic music) - I tell my story the way I tell it because it's just easier that way.
You understand that, right?
- Of course I do.
- Being brown and being brought up by a white vicar in a white household with a very quintessentially English culture has been difficult for him.
- It doesn't get more quintessentially British than the vicar of quaint little village.
- Alphy's way of dealing with anything in life is kind of putting it in a box, locking it, and kind of throwing away the key and not dealing with it.
- You have no idea where your mum and dad are?
- I don't even know who they are, Geordie.
- His birth parents have never been an option to him.
He's had to move forward.
You know, his motto in life is "Always look forward, don't look back."
- Your mother, she did leave you something.
- Why have you never given this to me?
- It was never out of malice, Alphy.
It was out of love.
- Don't look back.
- This letter that comes from his mother opens up a whole can of worms.
(drawer clunking) (melancholic music) - Isn't it amazing when you really think you know someone and then suddenly they tell you something and you go, "I don't know who you are anymore then.
All this time you've been living a lie."
What a horrible thing to be alongside.
Or is it?
It's such a difficult secret that it, you know, seen through, if you were experiencing the same thing, you'd feel exactly the same.
(melancholic piano music)
