Positively Vulgar
Last week's appointment of Mark Thompson, a committed Catholic with 25 years of highly regarded TV experience, as director-general of the BBC was greeted with near-universal welcome. The exception was MediaWatch UK, who expressed concern over Thompson's 'moral record' at Channel 4, where he introduced the viewing public to programmes like So Graham Norton and Big Brother - which begins a fifth series tonight.
Co-incidentally, an exhibition titled Censored at the Seaside opened this week at the Cartoon Art Gallery in London. It features the work of cartoonist Donald McGill, the leading exponent of the saucy seaside postcard, who, in 1954, was brought to trial under the century-old Obscene Publications Act.
Gill's postcards seem innocuous to us today. They are relentlessly smutty and vulgar but hardly obscene or immoral. As George Orwell remarked in an essay on McGill, 'his brand of humour only has a meaning in relation to a fairly strict moral code... Jokes about nagging wives and tyrannous mothers-in-law ... do at least imply a stable society in which marriage is indissoluble and family loyalty taken for granted.'
The disappointingly frequent Christian overreaction to McGill's postcards at the time should warn us against moral hysteria. Sometimes, we fear our earthy, all-too-human coarseness so much that we like to pretend it doesn't exist.
Yet, the gentle crudity of McGill's art, when compared to some of the material to which we are exposed today, also reminds us how far we have come. Whether Thompson will have a positive impact on the BBC remains to be seen. In a single (rather unclear) sentence in a recent interview with the Christian magazine Third Way he said, 'We don't like to be judgemental at Channel 4, but when behaviour is abusive, when it damages another person... you have to question whether it is acceptable.'
The wider challenge to Christians and their many fellow travellers on this road is how to uphold moral standards without sounding hysterical or wholly negative. Battles will certainly need to be fought and MediaWatch UK deserve respect for being prepared to fight them and suffer the (meaningless) accusation of 'being judgemental'.
But such engagement needs to take place within a wider context, in which we advocate and live a positive vision of what it is to be human: one that is prepared to embrace the uncomfortable, embarrassing and sometimes coarse 'fleshiness' of our humanity without succumbing to dehumanising sensationalism or lurid sexuality.
Nick Spencer
Links
Read Huw Spanner and Brian Draper's interview with Mark Thompson in full (www.thirdway.org.uk)
George Orwell's essay on 'the art of Donald McGill' (www.orwell.ru)
Media Watch UK (www.mediawatch.org)
The Cartoon Arts Trust (www.cartooncentre.com)
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