Think Twice About It Now

So Terry Jones said that "we would have to" do if "we" wanted to make The Life of Brian. It was an in interview earlier this year, and it was broadcast at the very end of last night's fawning docudrama about that film's famous skewering by Malcolm Muggeridge and Mervyn Stockwood on Friday Night, Saturday Morning.

That skewering was shown immediately afterwards, and the points made by Muggeridge and Stockwood remain unanswerable. This film is like any other creative monument to the Incarnation and must therefore be judged by comparison with other such, among which Muggeridge specified Chartres Cathedral. As Stockwood eloquently expounded, Jesus just will not go away. A London late night audience which had come specifically to see a show presented by Tim Rice, the lyricist of Jesus Christ Superstar, was audibly shocked at lines such as "Mandy, Mother of Brian".

As for things about which "we would have to think twice now", there are, mercifully, rather a lot. Would Harriet Harman like to be reminded that she provided legal cover to the Paedophile Information Exchange? Would any social and political movement still wish to be reminded that its origins lay in the Stonewall Inn, a major centre of the sexual abuse of teenage boys? Would the liberal wing of the Catholic Church like to be reminded, in that wing's 1970s pomp, it actively encouraged such abuse by priests and seminarians?

Would any of them like to be reminded that it ended up falling to none other than Harriet Harman to introduce the Equalities Act, which, with the full support of all three parties, has already made illegal any religion which either refuses to marry same-sex couples or refuses to ordain women, so that we now await the inevitable prosecutions?

But reminded they must be.