The Goes Wrong Show on BBC 1 the other night pretended to be satirising a badly organised Nativity play. Harmless fun you might say but actually this poor attempt at comedy was mocking the message of Christmas itself - the Incarnation of the one true God in Jesus Christ.
The real intention of its makers was quite clear in their ridicule of the Annunciation, the account in Luke's Gospel of the Angel Gabriel telling the Virgin Mary that she would become pregnant by the Holy Spirit and give birth to Jesus who 'shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest: and the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David' (Luke 1v32 - Authorised Version).
Am I calling for this sort of programme to be banned? Certainly not. The cancel culture should not be pandered to, least of all by orthodox Christians. They are the very people most likely to be silenced if the forces of the neo-Marxist totalitarianism behind the cancel culture is allowed to prevail. If there were a commercial broadcaster which thought it could make money out of such blasphemous rubbish as The Goes Wrong Show – The Nativity, then good luck to them.
But does it not speak volumes about the real viability of such anti-Christian propaganda in Christmas week that it was the licence-fee cocooned State broadcaster that was responsible for it and not a commercial operator?
The shame I feel about this broadcast, which I did not set out to watch (a member of my family drew my attention to it), arises from the fact that I helped to fund it by paying the BBC licence fee last February. It may have become a truism to point this out given the BBC's blatant anti-Christian bias in the past couple of decades, but does anyone seriously think that the corporation would dream of broadcasting a spoof on an essential tenet of Islam during Ramadan?
Charles Moore, a former editor of The Daily Telegraph and the late Lady Thatcher's biographer, who this year became a member of the House of Lords , has been campaigning to defund the BBC. I imagine that Lord Moore would be disappointed to read newspaper reports that Prime Minister Boris Johnson has now changed his mind and decided not to decriminalise non-payment of the licence-fee poll tax.
I am reminded of a time in December 2011 when Mr Johnson, then Mayor of London, happened to be present as the singer Annie Lennox performed a version of the beautiful Christmas carol, In the Bleak Midwinter, on the BBC's Andrew Marr Show. Significantly, this performance omitted a vital verse in Christina Rossetti's poem:
'Our God, heaven cannot hold Him
Nor earth sustain,
Heaven and earth shall flee away
When He comes to reign:
In the bleak midwinter
A stable-place sufficed
The Lord God Almighty —
Jesus Christ.'
This clear statement of the truth of the Incarnation would seem to have been too politically incorrect for the BBC to broadcast in 2011. I can only hope that after this latest and more terrible disgrace by the BBC, Lord Moore is able to appeal to Mr Johnson's conscience.
Julian Mann is an evangelical journalist based in Morecambe, Lancashire, and author of Christians in the Community of the Dome.
