AN EVANGELICAL pressure group set up to fight the BBC demonstrated outside Broadcasting House in Central London yesterday with the symbolic destruction of a large widescreen television screen.

The Christian Congress for Traditional Values is demanding a stronger emphasis on the sanctity of marriage and family life in the corporation’s drama, documentary and news output.

The group, which is threatening a series of high-profile protests if its demands are not met, says that the BBC is failing to represent family life as experienced by the majority of people. It says that the corporation is instead obsessed with “alternative lifestyles”.

The new group’s protest was timed to coincide with the publication of the Green Paper on future funding of the BBC.

The group is independent of Christian Voice, the controversial campaigning organisation that recently announced plans for protests against abortion clinics. But it is an indication of how the tactics used by the conservative Christian Right in the United States are crossing the Atlantic and being adopted by evangelical lobbyists in Britain.

Garry Selfridge, the founder, a public relations consultant who attends the fast-growing Michael Reid Ministries church in Brentwood, Essex, has attracted dozens of clergy and church leaders from across the denominations to the group.

He called for the BBC Director-General to withdraw his pledge to “push back the boundaries of taste and decency”.

Mr Selfridge said: “If he refuses, we will carry out a programme of high-profile events to put the corporation under intense media pressure to listen to the voice of the majority, the 42 million citizens who registered as Christian in the 2001 national Census.”

The group was formed after protests where Christians burnt television licences outside the BBC in protest at the broadcast of Jerry Springer — The Opera.

Mr Selfridge said that the BBC repeatedly failed in news and current affairs reports to use spokesmen and women on the side of traditional family values, such as from the evangelical churches.

He also accused the corporation of failing to portray the sanctity of marriage in drama productions, placing its emphasis instead on alternative lifestyles. He is calling for the corporation to commission an independent audit of its programming to assess how it portrays traditional values and whether it “fairly represents” life as experienced by the majority of people in Britain.

“The BBC blatantly refuses to give licence payers the quality of programmes they want,” he said.

A BBC spokesman declined to comment on the group’s demands. “We are aware a demonstration took place. I am afraid that is all we are saying,” he said.

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