Just finished watching Jerry Springer: The Opera on BBC Two.
Brilliant stuff! A witty script (are they called scripts in opera?) and an eerie performance from David Soul, who captured the look and mannerisms of Springer perfectly. The much-ballyhooed religious imagery could have been offensive if taken at face value, but if you’re taking this sort of thing at face value, well… there’s just no hope for you really.
And while I’m not a fan of swearing for the sake of it, this show managed to elevate it to an art form (the “fuck you”/“talk to the stigmata” face-off between Jesus and Satan is an early contender for TV moment of 2005). I loved the Daily Mail‘s suggestion that it contains 8,000 swear words — obviously a blatant lie (from the Mail? Who’d have thought?) as that works out at more than one per second.
Meanwhile, MediaWatch, the outfit founded by Mary Whitehouse, are almost beyond parody:-
There must be other West End productions that would be more enjoyable and appreciated by a far greater number of licence-fee payers? Why not, for example, screen a seasonal pantomime, with well-known and liked television and radio personalities, currently showing at provincial theatres across the country?
The best thing is: if it hadn’t been for the publicity storm stirred up by the Mail and MediaWatch, I wouldn’t have even known it was on. Thanks for the tip, guys!
I think I’m going to drop an e-mail to Ofcom to balance out all those complaints from the Mary Whitehouse brigade (at least I waited to see it before making a judgment).
9th January 2005 at 1:42 am
Re : the 8,000 words. The only way I can imagine they would have arrived at that figure is not only – as reported on the Beeb website – by taking each cast member’s F words individually (so, when you get one in a line of a song, you actually count it twenty or so times), and by taking the lengthy Satan bit as a load of successive incidences rather than just one long one…