TV review: The Bible: A History

Published on Sunday 7 February 2010 20:57

SHE'S a religious right-winger who has devoted her career to telling people how to behave, so it comes as no surprise to learn that Ann Widdecombe is a firm believer in the Ten Commandments. In her view, those mythical edicts provide God-given justification for her tireless moral tyranny, or as she would have it, good old-fashioned common sense.

In the latest instalment of The Bible: A History – a series in which various public figures explain what the good book means to them – she argued that only through renewed adherence to biblical law will our broken society ever be mended.

Not for nothing did the programme begin with the powerful image of her atop Mount Sinai, silhouetted against the sun, and gazing down at the wreckage of the world. It must be lonely at the tip of our moral compass.

You'd think she'd have grown tired of her own wheedling mantra by now, but off she trundled with the same old grievances: crime, alcohol, teenage mums, declining standards, no respect, Hell in a handcart, boohoo, Asbos, blah. Widdecombe doesn't provide arguments, just a stiff putty of intransigent platitudes.

And it's not just her opinions that grate: she sounds like a broken-voiced choirboy yodelling on a ghost train. Widdecombe doesn't narrate, she hectors. When she asks whether "we" have lost sight of right and wrong, she clearly means "you, you horrible heathens".

She revealed, as if we had any doubt, that she would happily welcome a return to Puritan law, because at least those joyless chumps knew how to deal with drunks and fornicators.

And although she begrudgingly conceded that it may not be entirely historically accurate, Widdecombe celebrated the book of Exodus as though it were inarguable truth.

When a perfectly polite historian mentioned that a lack of archaeological evidence suggests that Moses didn't write the first five books of the Bible, and that he may not even have existed at all, Widdecombe grew defensive and snapped at her.

The day Ann Widdecombe opens her mind, even just a tiny bit, is the day the universe implodes.

Unsurprisingly, she has no time for "trendy sceptics", as evinced by her heavily edited encounters with celebrity atheists Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry, neither of whom have ever been described as trendy in their lives.

I wasn't surprised when the oily Hitchens abruptly terminated the interview, but I wish Fry hadn't played into her hands by losing his temper. You could see what she was thinking: "These groovy young atheists can dish it out but they can't take it!" The hypocrite.

And at least Fry managed to remain articulate while arguing with her – I was shouting obscenities at the screen by the time of her infuriating encounter with a mother who had helped her terminally ill son to die. Widdecombe stubbornly refused to accede that "Thou Shall Not Kill" is not immutable in certain tragic cases, although she didn't say so to the woman's face. The coward.

As Fry pointed out, Widdecombe is incapable of realising that her beloved commandments are in fact innate qualities of human nature that would be observed anyway, regardless of instruction from a wrathful, finger-pointing God. But as she's proven time and time again, Widdecombe doesn't understand people, only her own blinkered perception of them.