Introducing this shamefully partial and brainless farrago was none other than Sir

Introducing this shamefully partial and brainless farrago was none other than Sir David Frost in his smarmiest Through the Keyhole mode.All this makes me rather sad I have occasionally envied those who belong to a faith. On the whole, it seems sensible for people to take time out of their busy schedules to consider the questions which Alpha’s boss, a smoothie former barrister called Nicky Gumbel, claims the movement is there to answer: “What happens when I die? Why am I here? What about guilt and forgiveness?” Obviously he is right when he identifies a “spiritual hunger, a searching for something beyond the material.”The problem seems to lie in the next stage. Having discovered why they are here and so on, what do modern Christians do with that knowledge? Walking with the Lord, where do they walk to?The answer, to judge from Alpha’s marketing drive, is that the journey is forever inward, deeper and deeper into the self. In his sales talk, Gumbel argues that “When people come to Alpha, it’s because they feel something is missing. In our work, in our relationships, we are always looking for the next stage and, when we get there, we think: ‘Is that it?’”These words, of course, could be spoken by anyone riding on the great spirituality bandwagon – cult leader, New Age nutter, politician or career shrink. It is another version of the great clarion call of the age: what’s in it for me? By offering the inner riches of a dependable spiritual portfolio, it is as cynical an appeal to self-interest as any advertisement for the National Lottery.In this solipsistic new faith, the old-fashioned ethic of good work, of giving to the community – of setting up help centres for the destitute in the way the Methodist church has in the past, for example – seems to have been lost.

The impulse is first towards personal fulfilment, then to recruit souls with the ruthlessness of a pyramid-salesman finding new suckers to support a scam.Is this really what faith is meant to be? It sounds more like an exclusive moral health club to me. “The great thing about God is that He takes control of your life,” a recently converted friend told me. Another said that, since becoming a Christian, he had become aware that temptation, doubt and scepticism (which he calls cynicism) were the devil’s work – presumably, he would feel that Satan is guiding me as I write these words.There was a time when such thoughts of surrendering choice to a greater being, or expressing paranoiac fear of supernatural evil, would be explicable in terms emotional vulnerability – life is stressful, and when things go wrong, we tend to go slightly bonkers. But, when pie-eyed certainty and self-absorption become the hot religious fashion of the moment, something creepy and alarming is going on.terblacker aol
More from Terence Blacker. Spare a thought this morning for Patricia Hodgson, chief executive of the Independent Television Commission, and probably the person you would least like to be during the present row over last week’s Brass Eye. Spare a thought this morning for Patricia Hodgson, chief executive of the Independent Television Commission, and probably the person you would least like to be during the present row over last week’s Brass Eye.
Ms Hodgson, it is safe to assume, would like to run OfCom the new super regulator planned by the Government for broadcasting.

She has already courted some controversy by granting – as the price of the deal she stitched together over News at Ten last year – an extra couple of minutes of peak advertising time to ITV, which is irritating many viewers. Now she has the task of responding to complaints about Brass Eye in a context in which the Government, which decides whether or not to appoint her to the new body, has registered its extreme displeasure with the programme.What is increasingly becoming the question, however, is whether she should be under such pressure from ministers in the first place Maybe it wasn’t Chris Morris’s best programme. Morris is both a brilliant satirist and probably the funniest man in British television. As a result he’s a rare talent, very much to be nurtured in a climate in which what passes for satire is usually depressingly trite. But there may have been an element of shocking for the sake of it – in itself a fairly long cultural tradition. Triumph of good taste it wasn’t.At the risk of repeating the obvious, however, it didn’t remotely condone paedophilia.

To accuse of it doing so is simply a category mistake that misses the point of what the show was about It was counter-voyeuristic. Not a single frame of the show is going to put a child at risk or result in a paedophile going free. Instead it played precisely to Morris’s long standing theme of satirising the kind of demonisation by the media-political complex which militates against solving problems.It also rightly ridicules the idea that nothing can be treated as important in popular television culture unless celebrities, however ignorant about the matter in hand, are involved. If tackling taboo subjects is the complaint against Morris, then that’s exactly what Lenny Bruce did to become one of the 20th century’s greatest comedians – as did The Producers (about a musical called Springtime for Hitler), one of Mel Brooks’s best-loved films.But in any case that’s hardly the point. The programme could, conceivably, be vulnerable on ITC rules dealing with the use of child actors – but then surely only if it was foolish enough not to be upfront with the children and their parents about the purpose of the programme. It certainly doesn’t contravene the stipulation in the ITC programme code that the commission should do what it can to ensure programmes are not likely to “incite crime or lead to disorder”. And if the complaint is that it either “offends against taste or decency” or that it is “offensive to public feeling” – however that is measured – then why on earth did The Last Temptation of Christ or Queer as Folk (which featured a fairly graphic scene of sex between a 15-year-old boy and a man in his twenties) get past the commission?But even if this wasn’t so and the show had been harder to defend, that would not undermine the larger point.

Which is the urgent need for politicians to know when to say nothing. Ministers were conspicuously quiet about last year’s genuinely dangerous decision by the News of the World to name and shame paedophiles, even when it led to riots and threats of violence against innocent people.But then the paper is Britain’s biggest selling (and Labour-supporting) Sunday newspaper. Yesterday Beverly Hughes, the Home Office minister, complained that Brass Eye was not the “right way to deal with the subject of paedophilia”. Apart from the fact that this is missing the point of the programme on a heroic scale, does she think the News of the World’s vigilantism was the right way?Ministers were also, at least initially, circumspect in the very different case of ITV’s democracy-diminishing decision to take News at Ten off the air. The case for similar circumspection over Brass Eye is all the more acute when at least some of the ministers concerned haven’t even seen the programme.