Kermit is risen. Hallelujah!

Me and ‘her indoors’ have just finished laughing at an inane Pentecost special on BBC 1. We’d turned on expecting our usual Sunday morning gigglefest at The Big Question, but this was even better. Classic tripe – and the Beeb’s religious programming unit really don’t know how much joy they (unintentionally) give to us heathens at times like these. Christians, by comparison, must be squirming in embarrassment.
In case anyone’s wondering, no, the nipper wasn’t watching. She’d spotted more sophisticated fare on a kiddie channel. Anyway, even her voluntary enjoyment of religious TV would constitute child abuse in our book, and swivel-eyed loons in pastel hued 100% polyester clothing so isn’t a role model for any infant.
The tragedy unfolded from some waste of a potential carpet warehouse in Peckham, and was led by the startlingly monikered Rev. Frog Orr-Ewing, backing music courtesy of a bunch of shoegazers who look and sound like U2 might if they couldn’t afford effects pedals and a light show.
As if the name wasn’t bad enough, Orr-Ewing had us wondering if Posh Boy Cameron has relatives born wrong side of the blanket. The facial features were identical (apart from a weird birthmark suggesting he’d wandered into a door with his eyes closed while praying), as were the mannerisms and oratorial style. Quite disturbing. Someone really should look into this.
On a more serious note, we probably ought to ask why the Beeb gave a Sunday morning spot to an atrocity exhibition which included (I kid not) two rhythmically challenged teens doing a creationist rap and numerous blatant adverts for the Alpha Course – the last commercially orientated bastion of homophobia in the UK, coming to an empty church near you if you’re not careful.
Various background pieces on the participants (inserted to break up the monotony of white care in the community types shuffling and waving their arms about to dirges they didn’t know the words to while token black folk looked on in horror) suggest there is serious money in this racket too. Frog and his ersatz Muppets were seen ‘ministering’ in a sink estate playground, and dropped numerous hints that they (and numerous others) will be funded to pester the public during the London Olympics.
So, do you know where YOUR council funds are going these days?
And another thing.
I see the programme, while based in Peckham, was produced by BBC Manchester. Now I remember from college days that this is where the Beeb’s religious team hang out, and these days the employees to my certain knowledge include an advisor on media strategy to the Catholic church and an Evangelical Alliance stooge. The latter also not only sits on the Beeb’s main ‘independent’ religious advisory bodies but is elsewhere employed as a TV producer by the Beeb, runs a website for an offshoot of the Evangelical Alliance and also does the PR for a ghastly megachurch in the Manchester area.
So, do you know where YOUR licence fee is going these days, and are you going to protest about it being used to publicise homophobic, anti-scientific, Christofascist scams which leech off the public purse and screw up the lives of the dispossessed?
Alternatively, like me, you could just draw attention to them, and take the piss relentlessly until the Church of Kermit is too much of a laughing stock to do serious harm.