MARK’S TV: God’s Slot
It is said in the Bible that on the seventh day, after a hard, presumably forty hour plus week of creating the world, life and the universe, that God proclaimed a day of rest for the Sunday. A day when he could trim his beard, build a cot for Jesus, go for a walk around the clouds and do a spot of people watching (we hadn’t invented telly yet at that stage). A day to do all the things that we, and God, simply don’t have time to do in the midst of the working day’s hectic creation, whether that involves creating burgers, integrated transport systems or even whole universes. If God truly created us in his own image though, then chances are that he probably celebrated a bit too hard with Lucifer on the sixth night, had a fight outside the pizza shop and woke up with a mouth drier than a nun’s crotch sometime around lunchtime on the seventh day.
If God really did create the universe then a Sunday morning spent sweating out last nights margarita and drooling into his beard is the only way I could possibly reconcile the immense lack of judgement that has lead to the BBC’s Sunday morning ‘God Slot’.
The God Slot is, predictably, the scheduling space before midday on BBC One, and for the past four years the bleary eyed masses have switched on their television and despaired as Nicky Campbell’s face has loomed out at them. Lips pursed like a cat’s arse, Campbell has spent every Sunday for the best part of half a decade poking and cajoling various faith leaders and opinionated morons (traits which are not always mutually exclusive) into ‘discussing’ issues on The Big Questions. In case you were fortunate enough to miss it, The Big Questions was a nightmarish cross between Question Time, the Gabbin’ With God radio show from The Simpsons and Kilroy, all held within the brain of a Daily Mail subscriber. TBQ is a screechy, wild eyed, fruit cake of a show, all questionable moral stances and literal interpretations of outdated religious concepts, which only really seems to exist for embarrassingly and dangerously fundamental members of each religion to have a good old histrionic shout at each other once a week, or in the rare cases when someone sane is on (Richard Dawkins has appeared more than once) to try and brow beat their common foe.
Anyway, The Big Questions is on a break over the summer, but by some miracle they’ve managed to replace it with a programme that could actually be even worse, Sunday Morning Live. Anyone who has ever seen TBQ is doubtlessly now in a cold sweat at that prospect, wondering how it could even be possible. The answer is simple in its crushing simplicity; they’ve kept roughly the same format, but opened the floor to the larger public. Instead of simply throwing in the odd tweet or text message though, the public appear on Skype to give their own views and anecdotes, some of which are beyond frightening.
This week for example, the panel ascertained that Sharia law is brutal and wrong, but it’s okay to defend your home with lethal force, because the bible says that murder is different to killing. So, basically, as long as you kill a burglar but DON’T murder him, Jesus still loves you. Score. Interestingly though that wasn’t the worst that SML had to offer, oh no, that came when an actual doctor, appearing via webcam, advocated the power of prayer in beating HIV and Aids. Now, I’m not a doctor, I can’t even win a game of operation never mind go about healing the sick, but I do know a little bit about anatomy and basic science and I feel pretty safe in saying that I would never, ever want to hear my doctor prescribe me a case of wishful thinking to beat a potentially fatal disease, and if they did I think I’d be finding a new GP. This astoundingly dangerous claim was thankfully followed up by sane doctor who decried the views of his, frankly, mental predecessor.
Unfortunately though, being in the God Slot the programme is clearly biased towards the extreme side of the theological (with stories such as the soldier whose mangled leg grew due to the power of prayer gaining sage nods of acceptance from the panel, even after he had admitted that he also had leg braces and osteopathic treatments at the same time he speaking to God), as if having a genuinely balanced debate would somehow offend the target religious audience.
SML then is astoundingly patronising to any rational religious people who may tune in and witness it’s dangerously fundamental takes the world. To anybody else it is mind-boggling, maddening and at times downright disturbing. I don’t know if there is a heaven or not, but if there is, and it’s populated by the type of people on SML, I’m fairly sure I don’t want to go. An eternity of that would send me so insane that no amount of prayer would help. By that point. I’d probably fit right in.
