Has Auntie no shame?

Rod Liddle on how the BBC was persuaded to pull Popetown — and waste £2 million of your money

'You may recall that we met at the memorial service for your uncle, the late Lord Grade. As far as 1 am aware he was the only other Jewish Papal Knight and he was a member of the Jewish Papal Knights' Association. (He was a Papal Knight of the Order of St Sylvester.) I was made a Knight Commander of the Order of St Gregory in 1985. .

So, there you are. And you were worried about the Freemasons. I'm an uneducated sort of chap and had never even heard of the Jewish Papal Knights, let alone Jewish Papal Knights of the Order of St Sylvester — he who, memorably, erected a church over the catacomb of St Priscilla and served as Bishop of Rome in about AD 280. But hell, you live and learn.

That extract comes from the preamble to a letter sent to the chairman of the BBC, Michael Grade, from a chap called Sir Sigmund Sternberg. There is an obvious contradiction or, at the least, mystery in Siggy's letter. If Lord Grade was the 'only other Jewish Papal Knight', then the Jewish Papal Knights' Association annual general meeting must have been a lonely and sparse affair. Who took the minutes? Siggy or Lew? But I digress.

Sir Sigmund is the holder of a great many religious and quasi-religious titles, but it was in his role as one of the founders of an organisation called the Three Faiths Forum that he had written that letter to Michael Grade. The Three Faiths Forum was set up in 1998 to 'encourage friendship, goodwill and understanding amongst people of the three monotheistic faiths in the United Kingdom and elsewhere'.

It is a terrible thing to see communities torn asunder in the name of religion. Muslim versus Christian. Muslim versus Jew. Muslim versus Hindu. Muslim versus other sorts of Muslim. Muslim versus Godless Infidel Atheist Cockroaches, etc. Such blind hatred and bigotry; so many people killed, so many scarred. We witness its denouement every day on our television screens and in our newspapers. So you might think that an organisation pledged to engender understanding between Jews, Muslims and Christians would be unequivocally a good thing.

Or, on the other hand, you might think that while a mutual loathing between the 'three monotheistic religions' is childish and stupid and calamitous, the time to get really worried is when the buggers unite and have a go at the rest of us. That is what the Three Faiths Forum has been up to of late.

That letter from Sir Sigmund Sternberg was part of a series of letters from the Three Faiths Forum to the BBC about a proposed cartoon programme, to be broadcast on BBC3, called Popetown. As far as we can be sure, Popetown seems to have been a cartoon set in the Vatican and depicts the Pope as a pre-teen idiot bouncing around on a pogo-stick, with a voice supplied by the vulgar American comedienne Ruby Wax. Sounds excellent, doesn't it? It was made by one of Britain's best TV production companies. CHX, and had a script to which such comedic luminaries as Mackenzie Crook (from The Office) and David Quantick had contributed. However, while you have already paid £2 million through your licence fee to see Popetown, you will now be deprived of the opportunity, thanks in part to Sir Sigmund's representations but also to the gutlessness, or sense of civic responsibility, take your pick, of the BBC. They've pulled the thing. You've paid for it — and now they've pulled it.

When the Three Faiths Forum found out about Popetown they immediately contacted the BBC and demanded that it be cancelled. They further demanded a meeting with BBC executives to prosecute their point and, regrettably, were afforded one — with the BBC's former hand-wringing controller of editorial policy, Stephen Whittle. Needless to say — because this is almost always the case — the Three Faiths Forum demanded the withdrawal of Popetown without having actually seen the programme. They just didn't like the idea of it and thus took it upon themselves to demand the thing be banned. As Siggy concluded, in his first letter on the subject to the then director-general. Greg Dyke: 'Now, more than ever, blatant attacks upon any faith cannot be acceptable.'

Can't they? Assuming Sir Sigmund was referring to 9/11 and the subsequent 'War Against Terror' (sic), I would have thought that attacks upon rigid religious orthodoxy were not merely acceptable, but actually vital. Assuming, once again, that Popetown did constitute such an attack. Which its producers argue is not the case.

At first the BBC was resolute in its response. Greg Dyke wrote back to Sir Sigmund, describing Popetown as a sort of cross between South Park and Father Ted, aimed squarely at a younger audience. Dyke pointed out that the producers and writers and indeed the controller of BBC3, Stuart Murphy, were all of the Roman Catholic faith. He concluded by saying that once they'd seen the programme — i.e., after it had been broadcast — they could make their complaints through the usual channels.

The tone had subtly changed by the time Dyke had been replaced as D-G, temporarily, by Mark Byford, and Gavyn Davies replaced as chairman by Michael Grade. Then Byford, or Byford's office, wrote back to Siggy an equivocal letter claiming not to know when transmission of Popetown was scheduled. Some time in 2004, Byford averred. Clearly, the resolve was weakening under the assault from Sir Sigmund and the 6,000 Roman Catholics (there are 25 million licence-payers, by the way) who had signed a round robin calling for the programme to be axed despite, again, having never seen it.

Also, by then, the new director-general of the BBC had been installed — Mark Thompson. And he, too, was a Roman Catholic. Maybe he was also a Roman Catholic and a Grand Warrior of Yahweh, a member of the Association of Grand Warriors of Yahweh. Who knows?

Everything in this little story is predictable. The BBC eventually capitulated and pulled Popetown, arguing that 'now' — that word again — the thing was not appro

priate. Stuart Murphy — by and large, a very good controller — commented that the comedic potential did not outweigh the sense of outrage it would have caused among Roman Catholics in Great Britain. So, if you're a BBC licence-payer, sod your two million quid. Just write it off as a bad commission by the BBC. A bad commission by a pre-Thompson, pre-Hutton BBC. According to the BBC press office, it is the only case ever of a BBC programme being not merely commissioned but also completely finished and then being axed.

The BBC has agreed to sell the series abroad, however. I'm not sure how the ethical stuff works here. It's not funny enough for domestic audiences, but foreigners are thick or irrelevant enough to like it. Is that the thinking?

I rang BBC3 and asked them if they'd consider my new sitcom, Allahu Akbar!, with its cast of animated mammals and starring Mohammed as a dishevelled, sexually incontinent chimp. They wouldn't give me an answer over the phone — but clearly there's still hope. I'll let you know what happens when I bung them the treatment.

And I rang the producers of Popetown, CHX, and asked them what they thought, but they wouldn't say anything, because they want commissions from the BBC.

I also rang the Vatican and asked to speak to the Pope. But the rude and stupid Italian woman in the press office who answered the phone wouldn't put me through to JP and eventually hung up. All I wanted was some advice about sitcoms and what would and wouldn't be acceptable to the imperial majesty of the Church of Rome. Apparently, the Pope hasn't heard of My Wife Next Door or Terry and June.

In the end, though, this isn't a story about the Vatican or the Three Faiths Forum and Sir Sigmund Sternberg. It's a story about the BBC's susceptibility to the remonstrations from single-issue pressure groups, especially 'now', especially postHutton. I know from my time at the BBC that vociferous pressure groups, no matter how minuscule their constituency, have an influence entirely disproportionate to their membership or affiliations. If they are given in to perpetually, then our national broadcaster will become nothing more than the purveyor of the bland and the boring.

Maybe we can agree with what Sir Sigmund Sternberg told me about the whole Popetown row. 'It is quite unbelievable how they [the BBC] wasted the money,' he said. Well, yes, Siggy. One way or another, he's right, isn't he?