Stewart Lee’s excellent Jerry Springer The Opera is going out on British TV tonight (BBC2 10PM). A bunch of ridiculous religious nutters are complaining that it’s rude and offensive and shouldn’t be shown. They should be ignored: most of them look like they’ll die soon anyway, and hopefully their attitudes will die with them.
The protests have made an impact among PR-hungry politicians (apparently, there’s an election due soon. Who knew?): Conservative deputy head Michael Ancram has told the press that he agrees with the protestors, and that the play should not be shown on TV.
This is not a surprise, but should be kept in mind by any classical liberals who were planning on voting Tory this time round. They are not a liberal party. They are not a libertarian party. They want to exercise more control over the important bits of your life (and whether you pay 35% tax or 40% tax is certainly not one of these) than do the Lib Dems – or even Labour.
At least they’ve got a point, within their own set of moral values. The play is full of swearing and examples of behaviour contrary to their Christian beliefs. I don’t agree with them, but it’s better than the furore that erupted after the Brass Eye peadophile episode, which got Dr Fox to say that ‘peadophiles have more in common with crabs, genetically, than humans. There’s no scientific evidence for that – but it’s SCIENTIFIC FACT.’ Every moronic celebrity duped into saying nonce-sense should have retired from public life. They should not have been defended by government ministers who hadn’t even watched the show, who hadn’t seen that the real villian wasn’t Chris Morris, but the publicity hungry, stupid, thoughtless public figures, people capable of shaping the minds of the mass of the population.
Sorry for getting a little off the thread. I’ll be watching Jerry Springer tonight.
Of course, I didn’t say that Jerry Springer: the Opera, wasn’t boring ;)
"At least they’ve got a point, within their own set of moral values. The play is full of swearing and examples of behaviour contrary to their Christian beliefs"
I’ve never understood this. The people swearing and behaving badly are the baddies. What do these people expect baddies to do? Just not pray as hard? Do they care when baddies are portrayed killing people?
Similarly, the word ‘cunt’ was exclusively used to describe the Devil – a sentiment one would have thought most Christians would thoroughly endorse if they weren’t so hung up about a particular combination of three consonants and a vowel.
Maybe they were feminist Christians who felt that equating the rather-good, God-created thing of the vagina with Satan was out of order…