Watch Out for Christian Terrorists!

Damian Thompson at the Daily Telegraph has this gem, apropos of the Obamanable speech:

The BBC Trust has dismissed a complaint about an episode of Bonekickers, a BBC One drama series about a team of archaeologists, that involved a fundamentalist Christian beheading a Muslim (as so often happens in real life, right?). The Trust has backed an earlier BBC ruling that there is “no reason why viewers would have been given the impression that the fanatics in the programme were evangelical Christians or that the programme gave an offensive portrayal of such people”.

We are deep into the realms of BBC bias and ignorance here. Only a BBC drama series would, to quote the complainant, “transfer the practice of terrorist beheadings from Islamist radicals to a fantasised group of fundamentalist Christians”. And only the staff of the Beeb, or perhaps the Guardian, would be so ignorant of Christianity as not to realise that nearly all fundamentalists are evangelicals of one sort or another (though most evangelicals are not fundamentalists).

This ruling (relating to an episode shown on July 8) was made public in the week that the BBC offered to apologise to the Muslim Council of Britain after Charles Moore made the perfectly true statement on Question Time that the MCB had been slow to condemn the killing and kidnapping of British soldiers in Iraq. I can’t pretend to be surprised by such double standards. But this is publicly funded hypocrisy – that’s what rankles.

If Ken Loach or someone wants to make a fantasy drama about gangs of homicidal Christians beheading Christians, then fine. Using the licence fee? Not fine.

Oh, and just in case you missed it, Bonekickers (“Time Team meets CSI”) was crap.