Fear and Loathing on the Learning Curve: Observations on Life, Tech and Web Design from a Slightly Misanthropic Mind

Jerry Springer: The Opera

Having had the mis­for­tune to listen to a local radio “debate” on last night’s BBC2 air­ing of “Jerry Springer: The Opera” while at work today, I thought I might offer some argu­ment to the masses who called for the sched­uled broad­cast to be scrapped, and who are, after the broad­cast, try­ing to hound the BBC still further.

I watched the last hour of the pro­gramme. It amused me in places, and as a piece of theatre was good, but over­all I thought it was poor, like a great deal of American com­edy. That, how­ever, is not rel­ev­ant. What is rel­ev­ant is that the BBC received in excess of 45,000 com­plaints from pro­spect­ive view­ers before the show was even broad­cast. To me that sounds like a whole lot of people “heard” bad things about the show and decided to voice their oppos­i­tion to it. I sin­cerely doubt that the major­ity of those 45,000 com­plain­ants actu­ally bothered to go out and see the stage pro­duc­tion before passing judge­ment on it.

I heard a spokes­per­son from the BBC say the fol­low­ing:

“People say to us ‘why can’t you treat us like adults, it’s our choice, why don’t you let us choose what we see and hear?’”

Newsflash! Guess what? You do have a choice over what you see and hear! This choice mani­fests itself in a device known as a remote con­trol. If you don’t like what’s on BBC2, why not change the chan­nel, or bet­ter still, why not turn the TV off entirely and read pas­sages from the Bible to your chil­dren, if you’re so wor­ried about the pre­ser­va­tion of Christian val­ues. Nobody is stand­ing in your front room with one of your infants in a head­lock, for­cing you to watch BBC2 at 10pm on a Saturday.

Then I hear that some Christian group is now threat­en­ing to take the BBC to court — the alleged offence? Blasphemy. There are a few points that can be raised here:

• There are hun­dreds, if not thou­sands, of pro­grammes broad­cast on both tele­vi­sion and radio every single day that con­tain lan­guage con­form­ing to the defin­i­tion of blas­phemy. That is “[the] defam­a­tion of God or gods, and by exten­sion of gross irrev­er­ence towards any per­son or thing worthy of exal­ted esteem,” (source). Bear in mind espe­cially that “Jerry Springer: The Opera” was broad­cast at 10pm, one hour after the sup­posed water­shed. There are not many pro­grammes broad­cast after 9pm that do not con­tain any instances of “blas­phemy,” as defined above.
• The last suc­cess­ful pro­sec­u­tion for blas­phemy in the UK was in 1977. That’s a full 28 years ago. Has soci­ety not moved on just a little since then?
• British law does not require that British cit­izens con­form to Christianity. How, there­fore, can someone be pro­sec­uted for blas­phemy against Christianity, when adop­tion of any non-Christian reli­gion is blas­phemy itself, accord­ing to the Bible?

Then of course there is the usual bri­gade of angry moth­ers, accus­ing the BBC of teach­ing their off­spring bad lan­guage and so on. Point one: no child with any degree of self-respect is going to want to will­ingly watch any­thing with “opera” in the title. Point two: If you’re wor­ried about your kids learn­ing bad lan­guage, what are they doing stay­ing up that late (10pm to 12 mid­night) and watch­ing TV, when the water­shed is offi­cially at 9pm? Stop blam­ing broad­casters for your own poor par­ent­ing. If you don’t want your kids learn­ing bad lan­guage, for­bid them from watch­ing TV past 9pm. Any trans­gres­sion on their part is your fault, not the fault of the broad­casters of the pro­grammes that are not inten­ded for chil­dren in the first place.