Television
Holy gay
Richard Ingrams
It was bad luck on Jessica Mitford, the subject of an hour-long Lively Arts programme on Sunday, that her appearance came at a time When I, along, I am sure, with many others, am feeling that we have all had a basinful of the Mitfords. Do we want to hear any more about `Iviuv' and Tars? and Unity falling in love with Hitler? Eccentricity of the Mitford school is interesting only in small doses.
The Lively Arts was something of a misnomer as the programme was far from lively and had nothing to do with the Arts. Once again the commentator was the telemonopolist Melvyn Bragg whose adenoidal accents intoned a deferential account of Jessica Mitford which really amounted to an uncritical plug for her latest book. Jessica Mitford is a plump, good-natured, upperclass leftie and she would perhaps have been interesting if she and her exploits as a member of the American Communist Party had been subjected to a critical approach instead of the standard BBC plugorama. As it was, the accompanying article on the Radio Times by Philip Toynbee was more informative.
After writing last week's column on Don Cupitt's Historical Jesus programme I saw by chance in The Times that the Revd D.
Cupitt is to be the preacher at the King's School Canterbury Speech Day on 14 July. I suppose I ought not to be surprised to find that this confused diluter of Christianity is an ordained priest. But why doesn't he own up to being one when he goes on the telly? I am more interested now in the historical Cupitt than the historical Jesus. Why does a man become a priest if he doesn't believe in any of the fundamental teachings of Christianity and why does he pretend not to be a priest when he goes on the box?
Like The Lively Arts the BBC's 'religious' programmes are wrongly named. The new series Everyman last week examined the role of the Devil in the film industry.
One film-maker claimed that the latest rash of literally diabolical films is a sign that 'God is using the movie industry today'. However that may be, the Devil is certainly using the television industry to do his work. He would have been delighted by the pre
vious week's Everyman — 'The Lord's my Shepherd and He knows I'm Gay'. This consisted of forty minutes' worth of almost undisguised propaganda for homosexual Christians, introduced by a man called Peter France. Few sights have appalled me more than that of the unctuous vicar of Thaxted, the Revd P. Elers, camping down the aisle of his beautiful church, not to say the group of assorted pooves in London clutching one another and swaying to the music of their 'gay' hymn — 'We will walk with each other, We will walk hand in hand'. Homosexuality is no stranger in the Church of England and is better known, of course, in the form of paederast vicars. The programme did not, however, refer to such tasteless matters nor to the vice and promiscuity which many homosexuals evince. It was left to one rather apologetic theologian to sound the traditional Pauline note of condemnation,. while a man who had successfully fought against his homosexual tendency was made to look a bit of an idiot for missing out on so much fun. The Bishop of Gloucester burbled something to the effect that we live in the twentieth century, and the insidious voice of Cambridge was heard yet again, this time emanating from the plump face of a cosy old theologian called Pittenger — a fellow of Jesus and Queens? — who defended anal intercourse as an essentially Christian thing if embarked on in the right spirit of compassion. Ugh!
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