Jerry Springer The Opera

This Christmas, Auntie put her foot in it again. Credit to the BBC: with its charter up for review, it would be easy to slip into a mode of comfortable, unchallenging family entertainment; but Pretty Woman - pretty unspectacular. That it has been prepared to screen Jerry Springer: The Opera now, in full consciousness of the hackles it would raise, is a bold avocation of its continuing independence and it refusal to be cowed by a politician's particular idea of moral or artistic norms. In spite of the fervour from Christian sub-groups - an anger which was not shared by all Christians - the BBC was justified in promoting an award-winning and popular show. Indeed, those same voices who claimed the BBC was undemocratic in its decision to go ahead anyway forgot that against the 45 000 complaints (of which half were about the level of swearing, rather than for offended religious sensibilities) were several million viewers. But at the same time as defending its right to broadcast, it seems a shame that the BBC has courted wrath for a venture which was artistically revolutionary only in a very limited sense.

Read the rest of this Review of Jerry Springer: The Opera.

Labels: Jerry Springer, Literature