Make Me a Christian? Not on my tellie!

WE couldn’t be asked to watch Channel 4’s Make Me A Christian last night.

When you have a heavy cold, replete with thumping headache and a barbed-wire throat, the last thing you need is a widescreen televisual encounter with the Rev George “So Macho” Greaves, the lead preacher in TV’s latest dismal foray in the world of Christianity.

The insufferable god-prodder Rev George Hargreaves – man with a face crying out to be blessed ... with a custard pie

We chose instead to read today’s reviews of the programme, confident that the grown-up papers would expose this latest bit of unreality TV to the maximum amount of scorn and derision.

We were not disappointed. In fact, it was just the tonic we needed.

Let’s look first at the Guardian, and Charlie Brooker’s take on the show which featured the following volunteers in search of an Invisible Friend:

A lesbian schoolteacher, a tattooed militant atheist biker, a white Muslim convert, a boozing fannyhound who claims to have slept with over 150 women, and a lapdancing witch.

Declares Brooker:

In true over-simplified TV-conflict tradition, it’s a clash of absurd extremities. The Christians, for instance, consist of an evangelical preacher, a lady vicar, a Catholic priest and – very much heading up the pack – the Reverend George Hargreaves, founder of Operation Christian Vote, and the Christian Party, and the Scottish Christian Party, and the Welsh Christian Party. If it’s Christian and a Party, chances are George is its figurehead. He scatters Christian joy like a muckspreader flings shit: indiscriminately and everywhere.

Quick to leave the group is the mouthy biker, who apparently could no longer stomach Hargreaves’ irritating preachiness.

Brooker elaborates:

The group seems pleased to see biker boy go. After all, what’s the point of participating if you’re not prepared to learn? As William (the Muslim convert) says, ‘Step one to learning is silence, and step two is listening.’ Step three, presumably, is absolute cock-sucking obedience – or it would be if cock-sucking wasn’t a sin.

Step up, Paul Whitelaw, of The Scotsman:

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 [the programme] 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.

And here’s Gerard Gilbert, in the Independent:

The Channel 4 series invited a diverse group of sinners from the Leeds area to sample a Christian life for three weeks under the mentorship of a quartet of dog-collar wearers, and potential viewers would presumably be, if not exactly ripe for conversion, then at least intrigued by what modern Christianity had to offer. Ten minutes into last night’s opener and most of them would have fled from this particular path to righteousness. The programme dived head-first into the sort of prescriptive, preachy and judgmental Christianity that puts people off in the first place.

We think you get the picture – Make Me a Christian is a load of crap.