THE broadcasting regulator Ofcom has rejected a record 16,000 complaints over the BBC’s broadcast of Jerry Springer — The Opera. The BBC broadcast was not gratuitously offensive to Christians but a “moral” satire on the excesses of television, it said.

Ofcom’s ruling came as the BBC’s Board of Governors criticised the corporation for cutting religious programmes and failing to find new ways to engage viewers. A panel representing many faiths will address a BBC seminar this week asking how religious issues can be better represented.

Ofcom said that it had received 7,941 complaints before the transmission on BBC Two in January of Jerry Springer. After the broadcast, there were another 8,860, including 4,264 e-mails sourced to one Christian organisation, the Premier Media Group.

The regulator’s ruling states: “The level was unprecedented . . . and appears to have been the first large-scale internet campaign to Ofcom on any broadcasting issue.”

Complainants said that the BBC had set out to mock Christian beliefs. They cited “swear words alongside references to God and Jesus; Eve putting her hand under Jesus’s loincloth; the suggestion that Jesus was gay; and the re-enactment of the Crucifixion”. But Ofcom ruled that the show “addressed moral issues in the context of a contemporary setting”. The show’s effect “was to satirise modern fame and the culture of celebrity”.

In a separate ruling Ofcom criticised BBC Radio Scotland for airing a listener’s e-mailed suggestion that a former Celtic and Scotland football manager should be pelted with Communion wafers. Responding to a complaint from the Roman Catholic Church, Ofcom said that even comedy programmes did not have “unlimited licence” to offend.

Yesterday a report from the BBC’s governance unit said that a previous edict to create “high quality, wide impact” religious shows on BBC One had not been acted on. The channel broadcast 87 hours of religious programmes in 2003-04, down from 101. Fewer were in peak time. A Panorama documentary, Sex and the Holy City, was a typical example of “ghetto” religious broadcasting, presenting a Catholic Church “preoccupied with a narrow field of interests – contraception, condoms, celibacy and child abuse”.

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