Weekend TV review: Gospel according to a holy terror

Published on Sunday 10 August 2008 21:16

Make Me a Christian, Channel 4, Sunday Kill It, Skin It, Wear It, Channel 4, Sunday

AS I NEVER tire of proclaiming at my weekly prayer meetings, the only way to fix broken Britain is if every single person in the country converts to Christianity. So thank God for Reverend George Hargreaves who has taken it upon himself to transform a bunch of heathen Northerners into lovely devout Christians in just three weeks.

The follow-up to last year's Make Me A Muslim (coming soon, Make Me A Scientologist, in which Tom Cruise sits on ordinary members of the public and repeatedly bellows "Show me the money!" at them until they convert), Make Me a Christian is just another chortling reality makeover show in which ordinary people are made to feel awful about themselves at the hands of bullying busy-bodies.

It quickly dropped any pretence of being about Christianity or the state of modern Britain to concentrate instead on portraying the participants as hopeless bozos. To be fair, it also depicted George in a terrible light too, which it did simply by switching on a camera and asking him to talk.

It's perhaps unfair to criticise this evangelical priest for preaching his gospel in such an insufferably intractable manner, since he's only doing what the programme asked him to do. But George was so arrogantly self-righteous, he came across as the worst advert for organised religion since the Spanish Inquisition.

Lap-dance manager Fay was interested in all sorts of ridiculous mumbo jumbo, and was clearly a very sensitive and unhappy woman. Sensing this, George regarded her books on witchcraft with the kind of patronising disdain that only the truly devout can muster. Fay's beliefs were poppycock, of course, but George's arrogant assumption that his irrational belief system was intrinsically better than hers was infur-iating. He subsequently made her cry by solemnly lambasting her neurotic self-obsession. "Her lifestyle is on a trajectory to Hell," he boomed. That's the way, Reverend, break their spirits and then lure 'em into believing that God will offer salvation.

George believed that conversion to Christianity would teach these people the kind of "decency, respect, moderation" which would magically result in the birth of a Utopian society. But surely those traits are just part of being a nice, sensible human being? There's no need to involve Him. It may sound trite, but as long as you're not hurting yourself or anybody else, then in the words of Aleister Crowley, do what thou wilst (NB: I am not an occultist).

Rarely have I seen images on television as harrowing as those shown in Kill It, Skin It, Wear It, in which fur-fan Merrilees Parker carried out an unflinching in- vestigation into the fur trade. Like Parker, I could barely watch the upsetting footage of animals being maltreated and bludgeoned on fur farms in the US and China. But it was important for a programme about this industry to include such scenes, their brutality providing about as powerful an argument for animal rights as I can imagine.

Although visibly upset, this footage still wasn't quite enough for Parker to denounce her fur-wearing ways. Her visit to a suspiciously welcoming Danish mink farm showed that animals can be killed humanely, although after visiting an American trapper she appeared to decide that beavers were vermin who deserved to die.

However, she eventually concluded that since there is no way of knowing how the beast on your back was killed, you can't morally justify the wearing of it. A thoughtful, balanced and necessarily distressing expos.