Jesus back on TV...30 years after Robert Powell’s epic

And now the momentous events of Jesus's last days are to be screened in a new television drama series for the first time in 30 years.

The BBC is aiming to make Christ's final hours even more vivid by casting well-known actors in central roles and adopting a 'soap opera' style for The Passion, which will be shown in six half-hour episodes on BBC1 next Easter.

James Nesbitt, of Cold Feet fame, plays Pontius Pilate, while former EastEnders heartthrob Paul Nicholls plays Judas Iscariot. But the central role of Jesus Christ has been given to a relative unknown, Joseph Mawle.

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Robert Powell in the 1977 series Jesus of Nazareth

The events surrounding Christ's last days on Earth were last depicted in a television serial in ITV's memorable Jesus Of Nazareth in 1977, when Robert Powell attracted huge audiences.

The new £4million series has been produced by Nigel Stafford-Clark, who is seeking to repeat the success of the half-hour-episodes format he used to critical acclaim with the BBC's adaptation of Dickens's Bleak House in 2005. 'It is a more extreme version of what we faced with Bleak House,' says Stafford-Clark. 'The stakes are higher, the risk greater.'

Filmed during the summer in Morocco, The Passion has been scripted by Irish screenwriter Frank Deasy, of Prime Suspect fame, and is an attempt to give substance to the characters surrounding Christ. The disciples are portrayed as distinctive individuals, while the scribes and Pharisees will be fleshed out, rather than depicted as cartoon villains.

Epic dramas telling Christ's story have proved popular in recent years, with Mel Gibson's 2004 The Passion Of The Christ and the West End revival of Jesus Christ Superstar.

At 33, Oxford-based Joseph Mawle is the same age as Christ at the time of his crucifixion. Mawle's last television appearance was in the controversial drama Clapham Junction, in which his character was sexually assaulted by a male teenager who had become obsessed with him.

Mawle graduated from Bristol Old Vic theatre school in 2002 and soon won critical acclaim for his stage and screen performances.