The controversial evangelical Alpha Course is to hit Britain’s television screens later this year in the first ever Christian advertising campaign of its kind.

The 60-second advertisement will run on the popular digital channel E4 at the same time as Big Brother is showing in September. It will appear more than 30 times and reach at least 2.6 million viewers, and probably more when the Big Brother final takes place.

E4, which has an audience profile made up mainly of 18 to 35-year-olds, is available on Freeview. E4 also carries other popular programmes such as Friends, ER, The Simpsons and Ugly Betty. The advertisement will also appear on cinema screens over the same period, and on gymn screens in branches of Fitness First, LA Fitness, Top Notch and Everyone Active.

The advertisement has been designed by a graphic designer, Alastair Duckworth, who won a competitin run by the Alpha Course organisers. The advertisement depicts life as a conveyor belt from birth to death.

This is the 10th year that Alpha has run a UK-wide advertising campaign and the first time it has taken to the television screens. The course, run out of offices at the popular evangelical church Holy Trinity Brompton in Knightsbridge, London, is one of the biggest success stories of the modern Church of England. Begun in 1977 as a four-week course for new Christians, in 2005, the most recent year figures are available, it ran in 5,700 of the UK’s 28,000 churches.

Although its detractors describe it as the 'Alpha Curse', it is generally believed that church decline across all denominations would have beee much more severe without its impact.