AT THE BBC we find ourselves between the trenches in a bitter war. And we have decisions to make. Do you transmit this documentary? Do you censor this feature film? Do you put this guest or this point of view on this discussion programme? Nor is there an obvious “safety first” option: nowadays, we get more complaints if we edit strong language from feature films than if we don’t; decisions to withdraw programmes are just as likely to be scrutinised or pilloried as decisions to show them. Every contentious judgment is taken to have a wider meaning.
Although Jerry Springer — the Opera is a controversial piece not to everyone’s taste, we judged that it passed the quality test: many people believed it was an original and outstanding work which, although irreverent and often very funny, had a serious and arguably moral point to make about the world of the Jerry Springer television show. Many had seen it on stage, but many more who would have liked to have seen it had not been able to. These were some of the powerful arguments in favour of broadcast.
Against this, in addition to the law, there were issues of taste, decency and offence. The first objection is that the programme would offend against taste or decency, mainly because of the very large number of swearwords it contained but also because of some of its sexual themes. The second is that, in its depiction of holy figures from the Christian religion, the programme was blasphemous.
In the matter of bad language, the Daily Mail in particular had great fun multiplying what it claimed were the number of swearwords in Jerry Springer by the number of the cast. Some of the words occurred in choruses, rather than solos or duets — and the Mail arrived at a total of more than 8,000, perhaps twenty or thirty times more than any sensible total you could reach. The language did in any case seem an intrinsic part of the piece, reflecting the moral and linguistic poverty of the world inhabited by Jerry Springer and his guests; sung in operatic style, it contributed to the piece’s surreal and original flavour; it certainly didn’t feel gratuitous. You have to warn viewers very carefully when a programme with language as strong as this is shown, but we felt that on BBC Two at 10 o’clock, and given that this was a piece of serious and demanding theatre, it was very unlikely to be watched by inappropriate or unaware viewers.
Blasphemy is a different and more complex matter. Some of the angriest e-mails and letters we received focused on what the complainants took to be the most grotesque forms of blasphemy: Jesus Christ depicted as a sexual deviant in a large nappy, singing that he feels “a little bit gay” and so on. But, for those who haven’t seen the show either on stage or on TV, it’s worth explaining what actually happens.
The first part of Jerry Springer — The Opera shows the recording of the Jerry Springer talk show with a typical collection of weird guests each with their own strange and delinquent story to tell. At the end of Act I, Jerry is shot by a jealous assistant and Act II takes the form of a fantasy in which the dying Jerry imagines himself being dragged down to Hell where he is judged, condemned and possibly forgiven by God, the Devil, Jesus and so on.
But the characters in Jerry’s febrile eschatology are themselves all recreations of the guests who appeared in Act I. The character called Jesus is not in any sense intended to be a portrait of the historical Jesus of Nazareth; he’s a palpably absurd figment based on one of the guests we saw in the first part of the show.
The play is a satire aimed not at Christianity but at what the authors take to be the valueless amorality of The Jerry Springer Show. The second act explores the interior of the fictional Springer’s mind — it was not a critique or attack on the Christian holy figures themselves.
One can accept that some Christians might find the mention of Jesus, Mary and God the Father in the tawdry context of Jerry Springer — The Opera intrinsically offensive, and that offence was another serious factor for us to weigh up, but here the issue seems to be once again part of that argument about taste, decency and offence to public feeling rather than blasphemy.
Over Christmas and the new year the protests about the forthcoming transmission grew and grew. The total number of phone calls and e-mails reached 50,000, although many seemed to have come from a small number of sources. In any event, many people both in the UK and abroad registered their disquiet.
A few people took things further: publishing the private telephone numbers and addresses of some of my colleagues; and in a few cases making threats both to BBC people and their families. I do not believe that these extreme responses in any way invalidate the legitimacy of the majority of the complainants. The volume of protests was something we did take into consideration, because it showed the widespread strength of feeling. But even if around 50,000 different people really had registered their disquiet, that number has to be considered alongside the 1.8 million who eventually chose to watch Jerry Springer and indeed the 25 million households we serve altogether.
Despite the protests, Roly Keating, Controller of BBC Two, Jana Bennett, the Director of Television, and I decided that the arguments favoured transmission. We didn’t believe that blasphemy in either a legal or a moral sense was at stake. We believed that we could present the programme in a way which would minimise the risk of it being watched by accident. We recognised with regret that there would be people who would be profoundly offended that a public service broadcaster was showing such a programme to anyone. But we thought that this offence was strongly outweighed by the benefit of giving the British public the chance to judge the programme for themselves.
After transmission, the volume and balance of e-mails, letters and phone-calls shifted abruptly. There were far fewer and they were much more evenly divided between complaints and messages of support and praise.
Would we have broadcast the programme if it had featured religious figures from one of the other great religions? Hundreds of the letters and e-mails we received assured us that we would not. In fact, I remember commissioning the Asian comedy programme Goodness Gracious Me a few years ago and receiving letters from Muslim, Sikh and Hindu religious leaders each complaining about the treatment of their religion and each certain that we would not dare make similar jokes about other faiths.
I am in favour both of proper sensitivity to all the UK’s major religions and of fresh efforts positively to re-engage with the reality of Christianity in this country, recognising that one of the unwanted consequences of the Springer debacle is that some Christians may feel that the BBC has in some way turned its back on them. That isn’t true — but I recognise that we need to work to reconnect with them.
Yet we must also stand up strongly for the BBC’s right and duty to remain a public space in which the widest range of ideas and creativity can be shared by the public. This is the point of the BBC. This is why showing Jerry Springer — The Opera was, in my view, both right and important.
Mark Thompson is Director-General of the BBC. This article is part of the Stationers' Livery Lecture given in London last night
