"With a church in every village, and the festival of Easter approaching," "Christianity is an important part of life for millions in our country." "If we're all God's children, what's so special about Jesus?" "In everyone, Dara." "LAUGHTER" "Jokes about Christianity are everywhere you look." "Jesus Christ!" "You can only say Jesus like that when you say "the baby"." "I know." "It's usually ickle Baby Jesus." "Baby Jebus." "We do seem to have a rather peculiar attitude towards" "Christianity in this country." "On the one hand, it's perfectly acceptable as the stuff of comedy and the stuff of drama, but when it comes to reality, for example, politics, it's taboo." "So it appears to be all right to talk about God as long as we're not being terribly serious about him." "THUNDER CRACKS" "Abraham!" "Lord!" "Unfortunately for the devout, religion is funny." "All religious beliefs are from an objective view, outrageous and to a lot of people, nutty." "It's ridiculous, the idea Jesus was married." "We all know he rose from the dead and flew up into the sky." "It does feel a bit like Christianity is fair game, it's open season and people are making up for 500 years of Christians telling them what to think and how to feel." "Hallelujah!" "Humour about Christianity ranges from gentle mockery... the sharply critical..." "Stephen, while you're here, is there a God?" "No." "No, darling." "Get over it." "..To the downright hurtful." "Eurgh!" "Some Christians may find this film difficult." "But I encourage you to stay with me." "My views will be challenged, but I will be challenging back...with some surprising results." "There have always been jokes about Christianity, but in recent years those jokes have become much more personal, rather nasty - aimed at the belief itself rather than the institutions and practitioners." "I'm about to hear from comedians, Christians and commentators to find out what is happening." "Why is it now so funny to say Christians are stupid?" "Is Christianity subject to more ridicule than other faiths?" "And is what I regard as most sacred, now mere fodder for a cheap gag?" "By examining the treatment of Christianity in popular culture," "I'm hoping to get to the bottom of how this country views its main religion." "Is my faith now just a laughing stock?" "The terrible thing about panto is whereas normally the rule is less is more, with panto, more is not enough." "But I absolutely love panto because it just..." "The theatre's full of children laughing and laughing and laughing." "Where is my Widdy in waiting?" "SAMBA MUSIC PLAYS" "'I think laughter is tremendously important, 'it can provide a release in difficult situations.'" "Try and lose some weight." "I have a fabulous figure," "I don't know where all the pounds go." "They're behind you!" "LAUGHTER" "But comedy is about more than laughter." "It can also be a serious business." "What we choose to laugh at can tell us a lot about our values, and about what we regard as important." "Will that be all?" "Yes, go and find something disgustingly hideous to do." "I'll join the Liberal Democrats." "LAUGHTER" "Comedy can be a window into the state of our society." "And I think something is happening with the treatment of Christianity." "There's an enormous difference between a gentle mockery of people in situations and how they might react to those situations, and actual contemptuous, sometimes blasphemous, attacks on the religion." "Christianity is now being subject to a level of mockery that many find disturbing." "No, no!" "Genesis is a historical fact!" "You're going, "For God's sake!" Genesis is a load of fairy stories to get the kids to bed on a donkey ride to Jerusalem 2,000 years ago." "Stop taking it literally, it's only the Bible!" "It's not...gospel!" "LAUGHTER" "To understand why this is," "I want to look back at some landmark events in our popular culture." "What they reveal can tell us a lot not only about the views of comedians and writers, but also about the place of Christianity in Britain today." "I know you're a Christian, Ian." "Well, really, in this country you can't go around throwing that sort of accusation." "When I was growing up, Christianity was treated with respect and taken seriously." "Hello?" "In here, my Lord." "But that's not to say there weren't jokes about it." "Good evening, my Lord." "One of my favourite comedies in the 60s was a series called" "All Gas And Gaiters." "What's at the end of it, I ask myself?" "A glass of sherry, milord?" "Oh!" "Starring Derek Nimmo, it followed the antics of clergy in a fictional cathedral." "An emergency meeting about the ghost." "Not more hysteria?" "!" "Here, the humour was based on the quirks of characters rather than their faith...and I found it very funny." "Once and for all, I will not pander to these primitive superstitions." "No!" "Don't put my shoe on the table, it's bad luck!" "May I come in?" "But the Britain which produced this show now seems very far away." "If we're all God's children, what's so special about Jesus?" "This is the actual picture, see if you can spot the face of friendly Jesus!" "Is that a pint of Stella he's appearing in?" ""Grr!" "If I had a wife, I'd beat her right now."" "Mockery of Christianity today has taken on a whole new meaning." "Has respect for my faith now disappeared?" "Journalist Cole Moreton has been investigating what has been happening with Christianity in this country, and how comedy is playing a crucial role." "There is something going on which is in the nature of a backlash." "It was absolutely..." "When I was growing up certainly we, this was a nation where you had to opt out of Christianity otherwise you were assumed to be a Christian." "# All things bright and beautiful" "# All creatures great and small... #" "We grew up singing All Things Bright And Beautiful in the school assembly." "And that has now changed." "Christianity has become something you have to opt into and as a result of that pressure being lifted if you like, that institutional association with Christianity that was there before has gone, and so it does feel a bit like" "Christianity is fair game, it's open season and that people are making up for 500 years of Christians telling them what to think and how to feel." "And within that, humour is being used as a weapon." "Is comedy now deliberately being used as a force to attack Christianity?" "To find out, I'm going to meet a comedian who frequently targets religion in his material." "'I respect a person's right to have a religion, 'but just how much do these people want from us?" "'" "'Christmas starts in October 'and lasts approximately two months.'" "Lights, songs, special meals, promotions, adverts, decorations, trees, nativity plays in thousands of our schools." "So my question is," ""How much more do you Christian campaigners" ""need from us before you stop your BLEEP whining?"" "APPLAUSE AND LAUGHTER" "Hi." "Nice to see you." "Comedy is the way that I chose to express myself." "I happen to be a political comedian primarily, but I think that comedy sticks in peoples' minds." "If you land a thing, if you express it well enough to make people laugh, there is a good chance they'll remember it, so" "I particularly like going after the aspects of religion that I object to with comedy, because there is a great amount within the Christian faith that I find horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible." "And there is an extent to which I would say, don't talk to me about the things that I say offending you, when the organisation that you belong to condemns friends of mine, would keep women from certain positions in society that they wish" "to hold, on the basis of a 2,000-year-old story, those things offend me." "Are there any lines, therefore, that you would draw on the basis that you might really hurt and upset someone?" "There are not lines that we as a society should decide cannot be crossed, there just aren't, in terms of comedy, in terms of what we write and what we say and what we joke about." "Would you mock prayer in general?" "Oh yeah, yeah, absolutely, because sometimes when horrible things happen, someone religious will say," ""Well, of course, if they'd only prayed a bit" ""harder in New Orleans, if they hadn't allowed so many homosexuals" ""and so much crime, God wouldn't have sent that terrible hurricane" ""that killed so many of them." Let me rephrase that." "That's horrible and ugly, and that must be..." "Satire and whatever else must be used to destroy those views." "'I may disagree with Marcus's views, but I have no issue 'with his challenging what is done in the name of Christianity." "'I do however think comedy should keep its hands off what is sacred.'" "Is it in your view acceptable to mock, say, the person of Jesus Christ?" "Oh, yes." "It's perfectly acceptable, you think?" "Yeah!" "Why?" "Well, because...it's not special." "I mean, it isn't, it isn't special, it isn't special and different from anything else." "I draw lines about things I want to talk about, and time plays a big part in that - the amount of time that's passed between a thing happening and when you might wish to discuss it." "That's very much a matter of, of personal taste." "But with Jesus, Jesus is an interesting character, but again a highly political one," "I mean, in his time, massively political, and changed thinking, so why would he not be a subject for comedy?" "It's just offence, isn't it?" "It's all right." "When I was younger I accepted Jesus in my heart and once he's in your heart he never goes away." "But is it all right?" "For me and many Christians, the mocking of Jesus Christ is deeply hurtful." "And Marcus is not alone in thinking that jokes based around Christianity's central figure are acceptable." "Je-e-e-esus!" "You can only say Jesus like that when you say the baby Jesus." "I know." "Ickle baby Jesus." "Baby Jebus." "I'm about to watch a comedy sketch that, in 2000, provoked" "Christians to complain in droves." "The complaints were upheld and a restriction put on its re-use." "13 years on, I have had to get special permission to watch it." "Erm, haven't you got any vol-au-vents?" "This is the body of Christ." "Eurgh!" "I think I'll wait for the main course, then." "Thanks." "Body of Christ." "Urgh." "I think I've seen enough." "I have to say I regard that with complete disbelief." "It was, I would say, sacrilegious." "and what was being shown was the mockery of the Communion, somebody putting sauce on the bread to make it more palatable." "This was the body and blood of Christ, those words were actually used." "It was appalling." "It was not one step too far." "It was a mile too far, even now, even today." "Blood of Christ." "Oh, yes!" "Marvellous!" "Give us two bottles." "To understand how this could happen," "I've arranged to meet the show's producer, Anil Gupta." "Take this wine and drink it, for it is the blood of Christ." "No, no, no." "I'm driving." "Goodness Gracious Me came about where, when I was working at the BBC in the late '90s, and we felt that there was an opportunity to do a show featuring and from a British Asian perspective." "And we did sketches about everything we could think of, all aspects of British Asian culture, really." "You think I want to be invited to such a low-class party as this?" "I merely gate-crash to spit in the samosas." "But on the first episode of series three, which went out on BBC Two, at 9 o'clock, we did a sketch involving some characters called the Kapoors..." "..who called themselves Cooper, because they wanted to be, they thought of themselves as English, very English." "And they, there was a rivalry between them and their friends about who was more English than the other." "Vanessa, for God's sake!" "Ooh." "Cross yourself, dear." "We did one in which the Coopers went to church." "What could be more English than to go to church on Sunday?" "Church of England, presumably?" "Indeed, exactly - very specifically the Church of England, which they said at the beginning." "They meet each other outside the church, there's competition as to who's a better church-goer than the other, who's read the Bible, who hasn't." "Well, we English take our religion very seriously." "Yes, WE do." "Dennis and I love ALL the English gods." "There's a series of incidents in which they demonstrate they have no idea about what it means to go to church - one of which was they go up to receive Communion." "Did you have any pause for thought at all?" "Did it occur to you to float it in front of a Christian?" "In front of a Christian?" "Yes." "Not specifically." "Let me just put it in context." "As far as I understand it, it was banned for evermore." "Yeah." "Indeed, I had to get permission, in order to view it, and I now wish I hadn't viewed it." "Before you think that I would naturally take offence at anything that happened in a church, I wouldn't." "take offence at anything that happened in a church, I wouldn't." "I thought some of the other scenes were quite funny." "But the Communion is sacred - the body and blood of Christ is not a joke." "Why couldn't you see that?" "I felt that the joke was very clearly not aimed at the ceremony itself." "The intention and what we were trying to do, was not to mock the tenets of..." "of Christianity." "Come on, my old fruity." "The joke was always that they didn't really understand, actually, what being English really was." "They played golf or they went to the tennis club or they drank gin and tonics and, and said, called each other "old fruity", and - the joke to us was always, well, you look slightly ridiculous," "because, you know, you think you're English - you're not, and the English don't think you're English, because they take one look at you and go, "You're clearly not"." "Ding-dong." "The makers of Goodness Gracious Me may not have intended to cause any offence... but I just cannot condone using the body and blood of Christ as props for a joke." "I want to find out why comedy writers now think this is acceptable." "I hadn't seen that sketch, but it sounds quite funny to me." "But then, you know, I don't think that the wafer, the representation of the body of Christ, it doesn't mean anything to me, I understand it..." "But others do." "I do understand it." "And I know that it matters to those who do it." "If I said to you I actually am wounded by that," "I wish I hadn't seen it," "I wish I didn't know about it, would you understand that?" "Yes, of course." "But seeing that sketch didn't stop you being a Christian and it didn't stop you taking Communion and it, I hope, didn't stop you remembering the sanctity of that moment and what that means to you." "But I think the issue there is much more the wounding, because the body and the blood of Christ in the bread and wine, that is very sacred, that is the person of Jesus that we're talking about." "Now I think that you would not, and I actually think that most comedians would not mock somebody about a very recent bereavement, they wouldn't do it." "No." "It's very similar, this is Christ, who died for us, when we are taking the Communion, we are commemorating that death, that sacrifice, and if that is mocked, it is like mocking an existing, on-going bereavement." "How long is the grieving process, out of interest?" "I think you grieve afresh each time." "Blasphemy, for want of a better expression" " I think that was - or sacrilege, actually hurts in a way that mocking a vicar has no impact at all." "You either think it's in good taste or it isn't." "You can actually be wounded." "Yes, I'm glad you used the word "wounded,"" "because it talks much more about your personal experience." "It gives me much greater pause for thought, to listen to somebody describe a moment of pain caused by something." "I mean I don't know, there's no way of my talking about the Goodness Gracious Me sketch that would make you come around to the idea that it was, you know..." "But is there any way of my talking about it that might give you pause to reassess it?" "Yes you have, you have, by saying, by describing the way in which it wounded you and made you feel a sense of sadness about a bereavement that matters to you." "I understand bereavement." "I'm heartened by Marcus' response." "But the fact that I need to explain why the mocking of Christ is hurtful is, I think, a sad reflection on the position of Christianity in Britain today." "For me, and for Christians, Christ is not a political figure and he is special." "And far too big to be mocked." "He was the son of God who became incarnate on earth to take away our sins and this mockery of the person of Christ is a new and disturbing trend in our society." "And I want to know where it's come from." "I think the answer can be found in our recent history." "In 1979 a bunch of irreverent comedians took the greatest story ever told and tried to turn it into the funniest." "When we were writing it, I thought we might get some religious nuts taking pot shots at us." "For many the presentation of Christ would never be seen in the same way again." "All you've done is to make a lot of people on a cross singing a music hall song." "And it's so disgusting..." "Could I just say...?" "Upon the release of the Life Of Brian, thousands protested." "I was the kind of Christian who was told by my pastor that" "I should boycott it and be standing outside with a banner." "The Catholic Film Monitoring Office declared that to watch the film was a sin." "You don't need to follow me." "You don't need to follow anybody!" "39 local authorities imposed restrictions with the council of Torbay not allowing a screening until 2008." "Crucifixion party..." "'I still think now,' that the end of Life Of Brian is sort of astonishing..." "Hands up all those who don't want to be crucified here." "'I can't imagine if I were religious that" "'I would not be offended by it.'" "It's sort of jaw-droppingly offensive." "Until now I have deliberately avoided the Life Of Brian." "There is no food in this high mountain..." "The controversy centred on the very premise of the film." "ALL:" "It's a miracle!" "A miracle!" "'It's about somebody who was born in the next' stable along from Christ who gets mistaken for a messiah, because there were lots of messiahs in those days." "By what name are you calling him?" "Brian!" "ALL:" "We worship you, oh, Brian..." "The main character is born in a manger in Bethlehem, visited by three wise men and eventually dies on a cross at the hands of the Romans." "Whoa!" "Thank you very much!" "But this man's name is not Jesus..." "Where is Brian of Nazareth?" "..it is Brian." "I have an order for his release!" "Er, I'm Brian of Nazareth!" "What?" "!" "It's a harmless film." "I mean it's just funny." "Don't touch him!" "I was blind and now I can see!" "Argh!" "You mean people laughed at that?" "I thought it was childish." "I thought it was silly." "I thought it was pointless." "I certainly couldn't get worked up about it." "Oh, spare me." "The clips I've seen so far, don't particularly offend me." "But I find the idea of the final scene quite horrific." "# Always look on the bright side of life... #" "HE WHISTLES" "I'm interested to know what other Christians make of this." "# Always look on the light side of life... #" "Did you see a Life Of Brian?" "I did see a Life Of Brian." "What was your reaction?" "I liked it, I thought it was amusing." "I was a teenager at the time." "I've seen it since, I still like it." "I did suddenly find myself though in that last scene when there's the Crucifixion, and again it's Brian being crucified, so again it's a different person, so that's OK." "But it's always when the camera pans back 'and you see everyone there and they're singing" "'Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life," "'I think that for me, suddenly I 'got that pang thinking,'" "OK, well if they're saying that Brian is the guy just a few, a manger down, you know a few crosses over, then that's when it hit me that, yeah we've got Jesus on that cross there, somewhere there." "And that I think is when the guilt suddenly started about," ""I've been laughing at this, I don't know if I should have been really."" "# Forget about your sin Give the audience a grin... #" "'Initially I thought, "Should I be laughing at this?"" "'I thought about the fact that it was not a depiction' of Christ being crucified, that Christ was nowhere in the shot, and had only appeared once in the film, from a great distance." "Did you think about him at all as you were watching the film" "Did I think about Christ at all?" "Yes." "I was thinking about the life of Christ all the way through and reflecting on what I considered at that time to be the truth of the life of Christ and the absurdities of ordinary human life which would have surrounded that truth, so actually" "it made the truth of the life of Christ seem more poignant and more real." "# You'll see it's all a show" "# Keep 'em laughing as you go" "# Just remember that the last laugh is on you... #" "What did you think of Life Of Brian?" "Did you ever see Life Of Brian?" "Yeah I did." "Some Christians got really upset about that." "I didn't because I was able, and I personally found it really funny, and was able to laugh at that." "Because I actually feel very strongly actually that the mature Christian response is to have a sense of humour." "and when you hear that wonderful song coming in," ""Look on the bright side of life," although that's a parody of the Christian gospel, there's something in that about fun and life and humour that I think is authentically Christian." "ALL: # Always look on the bright side of life... #" "Life Of Brian is now accepted by many Christians and it appears that is due to the Pythons' treatment of the subject." "Worse things happen at sea, you know." "'It wasn't about really the content of faith at all' and when they made the Life Of Brian they worked really hard to show that the figure of Jesus at the start of the film was a very serious figure and that what they were talking about was really" "just about the kind of uncritical way that people held belief, not the content of belief itself." "So that was no different really to mocking the civil service or the police or the army which was what Monty Python were doing through their work as well." "He's not the messiah, he's a very naughty boy!" "Now go away!" "Despite the initial uproar, many people do not now consider the Life Of Brian especially controversial." "Of course, the film came from a time when people still understood what Christianity was all about." "The film only really works for an audience who are reasonably acquainted with the Bible which is kind of ironic really." "How blessed are those of gentle spirit..." "'So if you take for example the "Blessed are the cheesemakers" scene, 'they don't ever spell out that this is the Sermon On The Mount." "You have to work it out from the 'way it's shot, the fact that Jesus is on a hill.'" "Also, it then assumes that you know that Jesus said, "Blessed are the peacemakers,"" "because unless you know that, the bit where they go, "What did he say?"" ""Blessed are the cheesemakers."" "That joke doesn't make any sense at all." "What was that?" "I don't know, I was too busy talking to big nose." "I think it was, "Blessed are the cheesemakers."" "What's so special about the cheesemakers?" "'It is written clearly, with an assumption of a level' of knowledge of the Bible in the audience, that I am not at all convinced is there 30 years later." "And I wonder whether some of the people that complained about it, will actually now find themselves thinking, "You know what, I rather long for the days when" ""people knew enough about the Bible to complain about Life Of Brian."" "We are now living in a very different society from the one that produced Life Of Brian." "A shared knowledge of Christianity has been lost and with it an understanding of what is most sacred to believers, resulting in a culture where the mocking of Christ himself is commonplace." "But since the Python film, something else has happened." "I think there has been a major change in one way in the manner in which Christianity is treated in this country, and that particular change isn't accidental, and it isn't the product of ignorance." "It is deliberate and it sets out to vilify and to ridicule" "Christianity and Christian belief." "This change began just over 20 years ago, 4,000 miles away, on the other side of the Atlantic." "I am going to preach this word of Almighty God." "I don't care what hell says!" "Fundamentalist Christianity." "Fascinating." "These people actually believe the world is 12,000 years old." "Swear to God!" "It is not my gospel." "It is His gospel." "It is what, "Thus saith the Lord."" "In the late 80s, America witnessed the rise in popularity of evangelical Christianity proclaiming the literal truth of the Bible." "Reacting against that came a louder, more aggressive atheist voice..." "Tell me when, Lord, tell me when!" "..championed by comedian Bill Hicks." ""Bill, you know Jesus died for you." "Yeah it was a long time ago." "Forget about it."" "Dinosaur fossils?" ""God put those here to test our faith."" "I think God put you here to test my faith, dude." ""You believe that?" "Uh-huh."" "Over in the UK, writers like Richard Dawkins helped to create a new assertive form of atheism." "'I think it emerges partly out of a breakdown of a Christian' consensus in Britain, and there's much greater uncertainty in society about what the role of religion should be in public life and there's less of an assumption that we're a Christian country." "There's a lot more up for grabs." "And into that kind of rather chaotic situation that we're in at the moment there's a space has opened up for a more kind of confident atheist voice." "Immaculate conception." "There's an excuse that only works once." ""Mary, are you pregnant again(?" ")"" "This atheist movement has had a long legacy and now dominates the British stand up circuit." "There's no way I'm falling for that one..." "But there are exceptions." "Adam must have thought this was a bit weird." "He must have said, "Look, God, do you think I was born yesterday?"" "God said, "Well you were actually, if you look at the calendar."" "Paul Kerensa is a Christian comedian who witnessed this development from the front row." "'When I started out as a stand-up comedian about 10 years ago, there were more' and more comedians coming through getting a quick cheap laugh by assuming that we're all atheists, assuming we can have a quick laugh at the expense of the Bible," "of Jesus, and that sort of move away from..." "You know religious gags used to be about vicars and..." "Bishops. .." "Nuns and bishops and that sort of thing." "It used to be if you're wearing the uniform you're fair game." "And now it seems to be much more, "No let's actually just swipe away the tenets of belief."" "I've had a lot of comedians on the circuit writing off the Bible as a book of non-fiction, writing off Jesus as a fictional character, and trying to get a cheap laugh just from literally saying that." "I used to think we evolved." "One of the most popular comedians, who plays on the idea that the Bible is ridiculous, is Ricky Gervais." "In doing research for this show I came across the theory that deviates from Darwin's and I believe that." "I just found it in a dusty old book in a library." "It's called the Bible." "LAUGHTER" "And Darwin was...wrong." "We didn't evolve" " God made us." "LAUGHTER" "If you go onto YouTube, for example, you could see a clip of Ricky Gervais going through the story of the Garden Of Eden where he's kind of exploring sequence by sequence how ridiculous it is." ""Who told you about the apple?"" "He goes, "The snake." Stitched it right up." "'He points out that for God to punish the snake by making the snake 'crawl on its belly really isn't too much of a punishment for a snake.'" "I bet it couldn't believe its luck!" "LAUGHTER" "It's going, BLEEP. "And you, you have to crawl on your belly."" ""But I already..." "Oh no(!" ") Oh(!" ")"" ""Oh, yep, yep, you've done me." "Yep." "Yep..."" "When I went to see a Ricky Gervais show" "I went from the point of view of somebody who'd actually liked The Office and liked many of the things he'd done." "It was a funnier, sharper, more worldly version of Richard Dawkins." "But where I began to feel uncomfortable was that in the assumption that everybody in the room clearly didn't believe in God because that was a stupid thing to do, and that therefore it was fair game to make fun of anybody who did believe," "I began to feel as uncomfortable with the idea that anybody who disagrees with us in this room must be mad." "And the intensity and that level of agreement I found really disturbing." "Religion's just what we thought before we understood what mental illness was." ""A bush talked to me."" ""Brilliant!" "What did it say?" "What did the bush say?"" "I heard Frankie Boyle say, "Religion is what" ""we used to think before we discovered what mental illness was."" "Now if you say something like that it immediately positions you as sane, rational, sensible, unlike, actually, 90% of the world which is rather inferior to us." "So you can actually sneer at an awful lot of people by attacking religion in that kind of way." "It's easy to pick on the comedy and say," ""These are mocking people's beliefs."" "But you've got to remember, the comedy is itself a reply to the sort of aggressive nature of American creationism." "His name is Jesus..." "'And I think that if the comedy is offensive 'then I think it's at least a fair fight.'" "It's a bit of a cheat, really because there actually aren't many creationists or fundamentalists, in Britain and yet all comedians know that it's actually easier to get laughs at people who think Noah's Ark really happened." "Not only does this type of comedy misrepresent what many" "Christians believe, it assumes that all comedians and their audiences are on the same atheist wavelength." "Is there a presumption that all comics are atheists?" "Yeah, pretty much, because it takes a degree of arrogance to be a comedian, to go, "I am going to do a thing now" ""and you are all going to laugh." And we think of ourselves as clever, as well read, as engaged with thought and reason and politics and so the idea of somebody doing a thing, believing in a thing" "that doesn't make sense to us, like Christianity, makes you go," ""Well that can't be right because you are funny and clever."" "Christians by their very nature could look like any..." "You know, we blend in." "And therefore no one thinks of a comedy room as being full of Christians." "In fact most comedians think" ""There can't be any Christians here, they wouldn't be at comedy."" "And I've heard that quite a few times." "That's very, very, very blinkered, surely." "It is." "You say, "Christians never laugh." Exactly." "I've had comedians who've said that on stage." ""I've done a joke about Christianity." "There won't be any here, they don't like comedy."" "Believing in Christianity does not make a person stupid or humourless." "In fact comedy and my religion have a relationship in this country that goes back a very long way." "Here we have a psalter which is a type of manuscript that contains the 150 psalms of the Old Testament, made circa 1300, arguably the most important sacred text in the Middle Ages..." "'Dr Alixe Bovey is keen to share some rather old jokes with me.'" "So we have on one opening an image of the martyrdom of Saint Stephen, with the patron of the book kneeling in devotion nearby - an image that you might think is very much in sympathy with the character of the text." "and then you turn the page and what we have here is..." "Heavens, yes!" "..a monkey who's reared up his hindquarters, and his bottom is anatomically very detailed, I suppose you'd say." "and indeed something seems to be emitting from it, and it's directed at another type of monster, who seems to be fly fishing." "Perhaps surprising humour but nothing there that's mocking anything too sacred, nothing there that's obviously getting the church uptight." "Is this typical?" "It is, I think, at this time, pretty much throughout the whole of northern Europe, I would say." "And the church was quite comfortable with this?" "It's hard to say in any specific instance, but the fact that it survives until now, that there's no instance of it being excised or crossed out, I think yes, generally speaking." "But that said, this is at the tame end of the spectrum." "So, shall we get out the harder stuff?" "Let's move on to those." "So, goodbye 1300, did you say?" "Goodbye circa 1300, hello circa 1310." "So this is a manuscript called the Gorleston Psalter, and it's an absolutely beautiful thing in the British Library." "I think that is rather wonderful, isn't it?" "And then you've got this completely revolting startling image of a naked bishop kneeling down, seemingly preaching to a monk who's pulled his cassock up over his hindquarters - is in prayer, but also seems to be defecating." "Well, I mean, I have a shocked reaction to that, but I don't come out of the 14th century." "I don't want my thoughts there, when I'm actually trying to concentrate on God and, you know, what is being said through the psalms." "No, I think I think my ancestors have defeated me at this point." "Is what we're seeing something that was peculiar to a particular time in Christian history?" "I think you can find a humorous sensibility in Christian culture from a very, very early date and I think there's always been an important element of entertainment and humour within a kind of Christian setting." "People have probably been mocking Christians since Christianity began." "In fact we remember when the apostles made their first public preaching at Pentecost." "People were fairly tapping their heads and saying they're all drunk." "They've been drinking." "So there's nothing new about that and I wouldn't want there to be a different approach to Christianity in which we wrapped it in cotton wool and didn't subject it to the normal basis of humour that everything else gets thrown at it." "No problem there." "But I don't think this entitles Christianity to be singled out for ridicule." "From what I've seen, the mocking of religion in our country today is rife, but this mockery appears to be quite selective in its subject." "Christianity seems to be the only target." "The Bishop of Nottingham says some Catholics will be offended by a Foreign Office document which suggested the Pope could use his visit to Britain later this year to launch a range of Benedict branded condoms." "I think many of us will remember that in 2010 when Pope Benedict was paying a state visit to Britain, there was a memorandum circulated within the Foreign Office." "And it suggested that the Holy Father might like to open an abortion clinic, launch his own brand of condoms, bless a gay marriage, and this wasn't just a joke e-mail between a couple of colleagues." "That memorandum was actually circulated within the Foreign Office." "I need a lot of convincing that that would have happened if instead of being the Pope it had been a major representative from another religion." "I've come to the heart of government to put this to a Foreign Office Minister, who is also the Minister for Faith and Communities," "Baroness Warsi." "I'm sure you recall the infamous memorandum." "You are the Foreign Office Minister, what did you think of that?" "Well, thankfully I wasn't the Foreign Office Minister at the time that that happened." "It happened in the last Government and I think it was right for the Foreign Office to come out to say that those comments were ill judged, naive and disrespectful." "I mean if this had been a joke e-mail between two colleagues, that would have been different, but he assumed that he could circulate this and that everybody would find it funny." "Why do you think that was?" "Look, I can't, I can't kind of speak for what was going through an individual's mind when they wrote a piece." "But of course religion is mocked and of course people joke about religion, and for every person it's an individual kind of decision about where they feel comedy ends and offence starts." "But the Government is not a comedy club and therefore we have to approach these things not from what we think somebody in an audience might find funny, but actually we approach things from a serious position of what may cause deep offence." "Do you think we're more respectful towards minority faiths?" "I think what has happened, and I've spoken about this in the past, on what I used to define as state multiculturalism, was to say that everybody will feel comfortable if you downgrade the majority." "So if we all stop being, if we all started being less Christian, somehow Muslims and Hindus and Jews would feel much more welcome." "As a British Muslim, I just couldn't understand that argument." "Welcome to Sparkhill, Birmingham..." "In 2012, the BBC launched the first primetime sitcom based around a British Muslim family." "Citizen Khan made light of daily prayers and the study of the Koran." "I'm interested to see whether Islam gets a different treatment from Christianity." "Come on, then." "Let's get this over with." "No!" "We're going shopping!" "Not time for prayers, understand!" "We're praying at the Mosque!" "You're facing the wrong way!" "You're facing the wrong way!" "Oh, God!" "There were two scenes that we knew would be sensitive, both of which involved people praying or about to be praying, in the act of prayer, which is a sensitive area within Islam." "There are people who think, well, you just shouldn't make any jokes about being a Muslim, full stop." "It's not a subject about which, you know, comedy is an appropriate area." "We thought, this is OK." "We're not mocking the prayer itself, we're not mocking the fact that these people are Muslims." "It's, you know, farce, really." "There have been some complaints, but to me the jokes seem very gentle." "The prophet Mohammed is never subject to ridicule or question." "Ah, Excuse me..." "SHE SCREAMS" "Get off me, you filthy man!" "What's going on?" "Nothing!" "Carry on praying!" "What are you doing?" "I was offering Mrs Shafik my condolences." "Mrs Shafik!" "I'm so sorry..." "Does the reluctance to laugh at Islam stem from a doubt as to whether the audience will get the joke?" "It's very difficult to do a joke about Islam because most people don't really know enough about it in any detail for you to do anything sophisticated." "The options are limited so you end up falling back on the most perfunctory and unpleasant and obvious stereotypes." "Very frustrating." "so I wrote to Abu Hamza about it." "He's a prominent British Muslim..." "One of the commonest complaints that you get, in comedy is people saying, "Oh, you wouldn't say that about Muslims." ""You wouldn't make those jokes about Mohammed."" "And the answer to that is very simple - of course not, because I am not entitled to." "You know the fact is I went to a church primary school where we sang hymns and sang prayers and had half an hour assemblies every day." "I am culturally of a Christian background." "And I can make jokes about it because I understand it and it's something that I grew up with." "Actually to tell a joke, your audience needs to know something about what you're talking about." "And if, I don't know, a comedian starts talking about the Bhagavad Gita, the audience is going to be lost and I think there's enough of a cultural memory of Christianity for audiences still to kind of get the joke when Ricky Gervais is going" "through the story of the Garden Of Eden and kind of mocking that sort of element by element in there." "And so I don't think there's a kind of cabal of comedians sitting in sort of dark smoky rooms saying we must kind of destroy the institution of Christianity." "I think comedy could be turned and has been turned towards other religious traditions." "For some Christians, having their faith come under more stick is not all bad." "Certainly in comedy clubs now, Islam is not talked about, it's a taboo." "And if they're talking about religion, if a comedian wants to come and talk about religion, it's generally Christianity because they know that's acceptable to be talked about." "And in a way, I quite like that situation because I'd rather Christianity is talked about than shoved in a box and not talked about, which can be I think the way that Islam may be in some ways in the comedy circuit." "It's not talked about." "All of that, God actually said, was to try and find a companion for Adam..." "Comedy about Christianity may well have its benefits, but has all this mockery resulted in it becoming something a bit embarrassing, something that believers would now rather keep quiet about?" "We approached quite a number of comedians who do ridicule" "Christians and Christianity in the course of their work and interestingly nearly all of them declined to take part." "But we found exactly the same reaction amongst Christians in the public eye." "We tried journalists, presenters, actors - they too tended to refuse." "Why is it that we don't want to talk about our Christianity?" "God is the great taboo in our society." "You cannot mention God at all, I mean, Tony Blair almost did and got into an awful lot of trouble." "It's the one thing you can't talk about." "Worse than sex actually to talk about your religious experience." "Do you think that the ridiculing of Christianity which we see in a lot of comedy, for example, do you think that makes Christians embarrassed about their faith?" "I think I'm going to have to revert to a fantastic quote by the last Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, when he said that it's seen as" ""a preserve of oddities, minorities and foreigners."" "And I think it is really quite tragic where people who do have a faith and a belief are seen in that way as being slightly odd." "And even as a politician I was told that, you know, don't focus on faith." "It's not fashionable to do faith." "What was possible 25 years ago for Christians to be more public than they perhaps are now, and I think society is squeezing people to conform in a way that actually moves against people identifying with the Christian faith in the public arena." "And I actually want to say to politicians particularly," ""Nail your colours to the mast."" "For me as a British Muslim, a country with a strong Christian heritage with values based upon those Christian values makes it easier, I think, to practise my faith." "I think it's actually quite sad if as a country we were to stop celebrating what is such a fundamental part of our heritage and such an important part of people's lives today." "Our country has gone through a huge period of change in last 40 years." "Christianity no longer holds the position it once had and digs about believers can often be cheap and misinformed." "But could it be that comedy can actually help with understanding what it means to be a Christian today?" "This church, St Leonard's in Shoreditch, has always been best known for featuring in a line of Oranges And Lemons but now it's much better known for the recent television series Rev." "Calm down, will you!" "Are you the parish vicar here?" "Yes, I am a vicar, and yes, I can prove it." "The series follows a vicar struggling with the realities of an inner city parish." "It's nice to see so many faces here today, who are so familiar." "The Reverend Adam Smallbone is apparently based on the man" "I'm about to interview." "Hello, I'm Ann Widdecombe." "I'm Paul, I'm the vicar here." "Or are you the Reverend Adam Smallbone?" "Adam Smallbone is this high and 20 years younger." "What do you think Rev is trying to show?" "When it first came at me and I saw some scripts and I thought, are they serious?" "Are they actually going to do this?" "Are they going to show the reality of a priest's life?" "I thought, yeah, I'm up for this." "# I love you baby.. #" "In Rev, we see the man of cloth in the round." "The Reverend Adam Smallbone swears, drinks, smokes and has problems with his sex life." "Don't mind me." "Want me to do round the back?" "'Rev is actually quite a reverent comedy." "'A lot of believers don't like it 'because there are references to his sex life' but it is a comedy that takes religious belief and the Anglican priesthood seriously." "Dear Lord, why do you make finance such a constant daily issue?" "'There are scenes in which he prays to God and that is not mocked." "'It's clear that he is a believer.'" "Rev doesn't shy away from the realities of being a Christian..." "She's only got a couple of hours to live." "..and sensitively deals with a crisis of faith." "She's about to die, Father." "She wants last rites." "I'm not I'm the right man." "I've been having a bit of a crisis." "Not sure I'm strong and able." "There were times watching Rev where it was deeply uncomfortable for a person of any kind of faith but what was uncomfortable about it was the truth." "Rev was one of the most powerful testaments for what the church does that I've ever seen." "It moved me deeply in places, it made me laugh with embarrassment, it made me squirm with embarrassment in some places, but it was a powerful testament to why people insert themselves into communities out of love." "I heard the voice of the Lord say," ""Whom shall I send and who will go for us?" And I said, "Here I am." ""Send me."" "What?" "Rev is the latest incarnation of a strong British tradition of comedy about Christianity." "After you." "I think there is much to be concerned about but from what I've seen, we mustn't always assume the worst." "I think Christians can be a bit too ready to be defensive and feel under attack when actually comedy is often pointing out the failures or the way that we mess up." "People of faith know that they mess up, that's why they become people of faith in many different cases." "Abraham!" "At its best, comedy can be provocative, truthful and can offer a check and balance for all of us." "I think if I have something to say on religion," "I would like for you, if you decided to be offended or object to it, to think, well, at least it sort of mattered." "It did something, it said something." "And if my comedy succeeds in preventing you from being a Christian then we have a problem." "And we don't have that problem in the UK." "Your argument through this programme - have we reached a point where the thing is becoming all too common to mock Christians?" "To which I say, "Yes, there is a danger."" "What we mustn't do and here we are in Easter Week, or Holy Week, what we mustn't do is to throw up our hands in horror and say, "It's all lost."" "No, the Christian church is still healthy, still strong, still doing wonderful things." "It may be impossible to agree exactly where to draw the line in comedy, but I hope we are now able to see the difference between sharp, critical humour aimed at Christians and the gratuitous mocking of Christ which, for many believers, causes deep hurt." "I think we should be a bit more robust and a bit prouder of this country's major faith and I think we should take it seriously." "That doesn't mean we can't laugh at it, providing that instead of showing contempt for what is sacred, and what can be quite hurtful, we should instead simply be enjoying some good natured, if rather pointed, comedy." "What's your favourite Christian joke?" "Er..." "Um..." "Well, this joke is a Tim Vine joke." "A man at the end of his life is looking back over the journey of his life with God and he sees that it was two sets of footprints in the sand." "He sees at the hardest times in his life, there's only one set of footprints and he is very troubled and he says to God, "Why is it that at the very hardest times" ""in my life you've abandoned me" ""and I seem to have walked the path alone?"" "God smiles and looks at him and says, "No, my son you are mistaken," ""it was at those times I thought it would be more fun if we hopped."" "That's funny." "Isn't that glorious?"