Don't Get Me Started - Stewart Lee - What's So Wrong About Blasphemy?

these people are religious they're offended by perceived insults to their faith and in order to defend their beliefs they're willing to take to the streets with guitars what if someone you know did feel genuinely that um religion was inherently ridiculous and was setting out to mock it with a view towards hopefully dismantling it how would you feel about that well you know that at the end of the day either christianity is true or or it isn't right if it's true you can't dismantle it yeah so basically it would stand or fall yeah um yeah absolutely you don't you don't protect you don't need to protect god you know god is either god or he's not britain is one of the most secular societies in the world church attendance has never been lower most people never see the inside of a church except for weddings and funerals but increasingly religious protesters and lobbyists attempt to dictate what we can and cannot say and do we like to think we live in a tolerant liberal country where people are free to speak their minds where we're all grown-ups artists aren't censored and books aren't burned if i'm not respectful to religion then people don't shouldn't vote for me they shouldn't like me they shouldn't do what i tell them to do but i shouldn't be prosecuted i don't believe in god thousands of people do they might be right okay but even if you don't believe in god the idea that you have offended a superb is quite intimidating my name is stuart lee i'm a stand-up comedian and a writer you've probably not heard of me but i normally get good reviews in broadsheet newspapers and i can pull about 150 people in a provincial arts centre on a tuesday night by my association with jerry springer the opera i observed at firsthand the power of religious censorship in britain today behind me are some christians from liverpool protesting against the performance of richard thomas's jerry spring of the opera which i co-wrote and directed on opening nights there's usually as many as a thousand but tonight it's tuesday question sport is on the weather's quite nice the closing third of the opera restaged an american talk show in hell where the tensions inherent in the christian myth played out as if they were everyday human problems religious stories have been used to address secular concerns for centuries from medieval mystery plays to milton's paradise lost and positive reviews in the church times and the catholic herald reflected this so he walked across the seas so you've got yourself crucified here's a little biscuit from me the opera played in theaters for three years critics loved it and it was described as the most important piece of music theater for 35 years but when the bbc announced a tv screening the sky fell on our heads christians who hadn't even seen the show took offence at its imagined content and evangelical leaders lied about the play misinterpreting its imagery and ideas to serve their own political ends they said that we portrayed jesus as a sexual deviant dressed in a nappy and that's a pretty funny idea but it wasn't whether you think of the people behind me as hysterical bigots or well-intentioned fools they are nonetheless divs but divs who managed to bring an acclaimed theater production to its knees generate 65 000 complaints in advance of a screening send bbc executives into hiding and prevent venues all over the country from taking the show divs that give an indication of the extent of the power of religious protest in britain today people have the right to be offended and they have the right to protest against a a player or an article that has caused them offense what they don't have is a right to take the law into their own hands or even to suggest that there should be a law to limit a speech that's merely offensive um this is a leaflet protesting the show full of out of context quotes reactionary invective and a photo of me looking like the devil uh it's produced by christian institute whose charitable status was questioned in parliament recently after it was revealed that they spent twenty thousand pounds of tax-free money on a newspaper advert protesting against same-sex partnerships insults on leaflets are like holy water off a duck's back but the protest did work if it's clearly advertised this may be offensive don't watch it or it's a play where people have to pay to go into then i don't think there should be any restrictions around respect for other people i said to the people protesting at the bbc when bbc two put on your musical this is a hand control a remote use it turn over don't seek to stop other people from watching it jerry springer the opera played to packed houses at the national theatre in london but its chances of reaching a wider audience all around the country were reduced by fanatical right-wing christian opposition a benefit performance for a cancer charity was also cancelled after their hospice was threatened with christian picketing there was talk of the composer and i being prosecuted for blasphemy but ultimately the case was not pursued presumably on the grounds that it isn't 1508 we may not have been burned at the stake but sadly our souls remain in danger i was getting all this kind of hate mail all the time and it was it still goes on now and it was quite distressing but there was i didn't get one funny one in march last year where someone wrote to me and they said i enjoyed listening to you defend your work on radio 5 yesterday you seem like a very intelligent and thoughtful young man what a pity you'll be going to hell i can still remember the first time i found religion funny it was at primary school when our headmaster told us a story about how god always answers our prayers once upon a time there was a little girl her mother told her that god loved her and that he would always answer her prayers the little girl had eyes of the darkest brown but she didn't want them she wanted blue eyes so that night she prayed to god dear god please let me have blue eyes but in the morning when she awoke her eyes were still brown the next evening she prayed to god again dear god please let me have blue eyes but when she awoke in the morning her eyes were still brown and the third night the little girl prayed to god again dear god please please can i have blue eyes but when she awoke again as usual her eyes were still brown and the little girl said to her mother mother you told me that god loved me and would always answer my prayers but the last three nights i prayed to him to have blue eyes and still in the morning my eyes are brown so god did not answer my prayers and the mother said oh my child god did answer your prayers but on this occasion his answer was no i was only eight years old when i first laughed at the absurdity of that little religious fable and i've found religion funny ever since also beautiful sometimes inspiring and occasionally sublime but i'm afraid also irrational and funny but not one second more you understand promise there's a long and inglorious history of religious fundamentalists taking offense at satire they were up in arms back in 1979 when monty python released life of brian a beautifully sculpted biblical epic that somehow manages to make a thoughtful and insightful look at the nature of belief hilarious you don't need to follow me you don't need to follow anybody you've got to think for yourselves you're all individual ten years later salman rushdie published the satanic verses and suddenly it really wasn't funny anymore in iran rushdie was sentenced to death in a fatwa religious ruling issued by the ayatollah homaini for insulting islam a japanese translator of the satanic verses was murdered in 1991 and scores of people died in protests in india and pakistan in turkey 37 people died in 1993 when a hotel was set alive by angry muslim protesters in 2005 sikh protesters forced to play beshte off the stage of a theater in birmingham beshte was written by a sikh woman and set in a sikh temple it dealt with the role of women in that community the protesters fury sent the playwright into hiding i think there is a concerted effort by religious conservatives in many religions to protect themselves and i would if i was one of those i would do it okay because they know how vulnerable they are to satire and criticism so there's a concerted effort to restrict free speech it's in their interest it's not just one of these things that's happening religious fundamentalists of all shapes and sizes are becoming more vociferous in their attacks as if competing to see who can be the most upset but some believers think satire is healthy for the development of religious debate the reverend simon stevens is one and when he agreed to talk to me i was as happy as the editor of the daily mail when he finds a black pundit to complain about immigration for a moment i thought there was a god when the christian voice organization complained about jerry springer the opera being on television uh the head guy talked about how he felt that when they protested about this play beshte and birmingham the sikhs had stolen a march on them yeah do you think there's a kind of escalation between different groups yeah i feel that a lot of the christian response to things like jerry spring the opera is coloured by muslim offense and hindu offense so in a sense we want to prove that we love god as much as they do so let's let's be just as offended as they are um i've actually had people saying that things like you know well of course if you've done that to muslims they'd have issued you know a death sentence against you as if like that the archbishop of canterbury the fact that the archbishop of canterbury doesn't issue fatwas you know he's somehow a bad he's weak let's get some more fatwa down there then they'll respect the church in october 2005 more angry protests resulted from the publication in denmark of cartoons which made clumsy jokes about islam the danish cartoons was i think a really explosive scenario i think that a certain amount of the long-term offense that was caused and some of the violent protests all over the world were really manufactured as a campaigner myself i know that there are very few spontaneous protests in the in the world of campaigning so there's definite mischief on the part of some people who wanted to stir up a clash of civilizations who who mixed new even more offensive cartoons with the original cartoons who took them around the middle east to stir up uh hatred i think that was a definite mischief when muslim protests began to spread across europe newspapers had to decide whether the artistic value of the cartoons outweighed the risk of violent reprisals as a safety measure i'm reading this voice over wearing a cycling helmet do you think that the danish um the danish cartoons of muhammad would have been easier to defend had they been better they're not they're not hugely funny one of the problems about censorship has always been that you end up defending rubbish or whether it's rubbish porno movies uh you're very rarely in the position lady chatterley was an exception uh defending something has any artistic merit whatever and so you're a bit stuck you look at this and say would i publish those cartoons well they were awful they were horribly drawn even bastions of free speech like the guardian decided not to reprint the cartoons they had a nasty side to them and they weren't funny yeah so in a sense it gave editors an out and gave the guardian an hour to say well you know wouldn't publish this anyway yeah uh so the only point of publishing it would be in order to be provocative do we deliberately wish to be provocative no uh can the police protect us and so you know it was um the better part of valor but it left a lot a lot of editors feeling very uncomfortable and a lot of readers feeling very uncomfortable because uh it was intimidating followers of faiths other than christianity complain that there's an in-built unfairness in the system as it stands the blasphemy laws only relate to the church of england the religion of the state in january 2006 the government tried to introduce a new bill to remedy the situation liberal democrat mp evan harris was one of many to oppose the incitement to racial and religious hatred bill which promised to protect all major religions the government was quite explicit about this because i said isn't it important that we allow people to to speak freely without worrying about the criminal law the criminal law and the minister said no we the part of the point of this bill which we fortunately were able to defeat was that people should think carefully before speaking i don't see why i mean ministers very rarely do why should they create laws to force us i mean it's recommended i advise it i try to do so at least until this interview prepare what i'm going to say carefully but but i don't see why i should be forced by criminal sanction to think before i speak when i'm not inciting violence when i'm not defaming people i'm just criticizing strongly in strong terms as i want to beliefs with which i find abhorrent i think we need to take seriously the notion that no one should have to be offended by anything i mean this seems to be another idea that's out in the ether at the moment i have the right not to be offended there's absolutely no right not to be offended i think we should all be polite and careful and i but i don't think that should be advice backed by criminal law unless you're inciting violence shouting fire in a theater public order directly abusing someone that's a public order offense or inciting hatred against someone on the base of their race the government warned writers and comedians that material considered reckless by the new law would lead to prosecution but how do you define recklessness rowan atkinson led the opposition and you may even decide after after much prayer to um to enter into a committed and uh tempted relationship with a member of the same um same genital group rowan atkinson made his reputation on the 1980s show not at nine o'clock news and here this gentle almost affectionate satire of the church of england's attitude to homosexuality was prophetic 20 years later the issue is in the process of splitting the anglican church worldwide which will be a terrible loss to the discipline of flower that god just wants you to have a rotten life god's like that he hates proofs the religious hatred uh bill was really the product of a great deal of lobbying for for some time by the muslim community um or the leaders of the muslim community i should makes make clear um who who felt very much that um there was a blasphemy law that covered um uh you know christianity in fact it only covers the church of england the established church um but they felt that uh the religion is covered um mainstream christianity and that there's no such thing in relation to muslims and it was all the way back to the salman rushdie affair where the whole business of boot burning and the fatwa because offense was taken about salman rushdie's book and there was a call at that time for the blasphemy law to be extended to cover um islam if the bill had passed the makers of the comedy series goodness gracious meme might even have ended up in the dock one now rarely seen sketch parodied asian stereotypes using some of white christian britain's traditional sacred cows the sketch was um about some characters in the show regular running characters uh who called the coopers they were actually called kapoor but they called themselves cooper they the the gag was they tried to be more british than the british and kept getting it wrong because they didn't really understand so uh on that particular week they were going to church because that's what you do if you're english church of england obviously hmm marvelous give us two bottles and then he gives the wafer and uh says body of christ and one of them says oh disgusting haven't got any olive oils and and goes off you know in disgust body of christ and the last guy says thank you very much put some dips in some chutney and eat it but then there was a payoff at the end a clever satirical payoff there was a terrific playoff at the end because the gag again is that they're being really brilliant they hate uh black people the right reverend bishop of hounslow oh my god the bishops are back so who complained about it and what happened that particular episode i think was the number one rated show on bbc2 that week yeah so got about five million viewers and overnight apparently i can't remember exactly the numbers but it was about 300 or so complaints or registered on the bbc phone log and i got a phone call on saturday from my boss saying right you've had these complaints the show was due to be repeated on the sunday and they said you'll have to come in and cut that bit right i said you know this is surely a defensible thing this is something we can argue and they just the bbc weren't interested they said no no you will come in you will cut it that will be it was the indication that you just overstepped religions other than our own yeah and i said well hang on a minute we were all brought up in this country you know i went to i went to a state school i had to attend my daily act of christian worship as required by law yeah you know was what bit of it is you know about the church that i'm not able to comment on religious education at school surely that's one way of guaranteeing that we all develop an understanding of each other's religious background thus ensuring greater social harmony faith schools are going to be the worst disaster we've already got 60 more since labour came to power with many more planned it is absolutely fatal for community relations if you have all the christians in one school muslims in another hindus in another maybe the answer is some new religions some new gods he was a snake with long blonde hair and ears and sleepy looking always yeah look disturbingly like paris hilton oh yeah welcome to this avenue of trees where i have all my most profound thoughts in the absence of any physical evidence of god or gods religion remains an idea but an idea nonetheless which exerts a powerful influence over everyday life morality social policy many of the world's most powerful leaders claim to be acting on behalf of god rather than the electorate so religion has to remain open to discussion whether that discussion takes the form of reason debate or sacrilegious satire for us the use of religious figures in jerry springer the opera was a means to an end a way of taking a funny look at more important ideas like guilt and responsibility in human relationships we never anticipated anyone would react so vociferously thank god you're here there's no doubt that being at the receiving end of uh of jokes or lampooning or satire about your about your religious beliefs about any of your beliefs even about your political beliefs can be a pretty painful business but it's always been very important in democracies that one one can use those devices in some ways to prick the balloon of of of beliefs because it is actually part of uh the great business of of of reaching towards truths um that we that we have in our if you like our armory of debate that we can at times make fun of someone's beliefs it's not as if doing comedy about religion is a new idea dave allen was famous for making boardy jokes about the catholic church and rarely looked more at home than when dressed as a man of the cloth he later said he'd been able to defuse the fury of an irate catholic who accosted him by saying that this sketch featured the protestant archbishop of canterbury rather than a good catholic bishop i always feel that you know especially in comedy when when a fence walks a line you know what you're trying to do is you're trying to you're trying to sort of say something you know i mean in a sense you know if you if you send me up and you put a grain of truth in that then you know then there might i may feel quite threatened i may feel quite offended but maybe it's something i need to hear and i think you know what i have a problem with in terms of offense is for instance people who just lambast a minority for the sake of it what we mustn't do is cover religion and a special protection because religion like any other belief system has to be held up to question and that is what is so healthy about a democracy and what we have to persuade new communities is that these values are good things it's actually what makes living in britain so terrific 21st century britain is home to a variety of different faiths on any given day you can find modern britons bowing to mecca chanting to buddha sacrificing insects and reptiles to satan even worshiping the water walking winemaking leper healing jesus christ himself but what constitutes a legitimate religion well the government spent hours on producing a very lengthy answer which says it's up to the court it's up to the court that was their answer and that was just saying that uh again that's no that's that doesn't build confidence because that implies that you're taken all the way to the police station all the way to the crown prosecution service all the way to the plea and then it's up to the jury unless the attorney general this was their answer would step in at the last minute thank you very much mr politician and say you know um in the same way as he said the war in iraq was legal yeah that this is okay to prosecute or not and i don't think our freedoms particularly at the end of such a process should be decided by a politician it wasn't even leaving it to the judges and that's bad enough yeah the only definition of what a religion is comes under charity law where the charity commission has to decide which side of the night and they decided that the pagans weren't because they believed in a whole host of deities in nature but the odin worshipers were because odin was the king god and that was okay so they made that absurd distinction i wasn't aware that it's fantastic it's very good so you can get charitable status if you have a head of your clan of gods but if they're diffused if they're diffused they live in trees and bushes you're done for right tree huggers out odin worshipers in but are all religions entitled to the same degree of respect or should protection only be afforded to those with significant numbers of followers we can't just have anyone claiming to be right about everything can we there's such a variety of veneration going on all around the world that it can be difficult if not impossible to grant all religious worship as the same credence they've all found ways of making their own holy magic from fondling snakes to swimming in their clothes from falling over to vigorous interpretive dance alan moore is a writer and magician from northampton he's a stranger to hairdressers and worships his very own god in his very own way blurring the lines between religious belief magic and the power of the creative imagination if you film him from strange angles you can make him look very sinister but he isn't really alan's familiar on his journey of faith and worship is an ancient roman glove puppet snake called glycon well actually i just thought he looked gorgeous he looked so smug and he'd got this kind of these lidded eyes and this superior expression which i identified with in a certain way and also like i say it's just the absurdity of this limbless serpentine body and this paris hilton head on top of it it's irresistible he's certainly the coolest most rock and roll looking god that i've ever seen i just fell in love at first sight you've not chosen to worship paris hilton though by extension no i've certainly not no it's sort of uh i mean there are limits you know even to somebody who's worshiping a hairy snake you know i mean uh i'm not gonna go mad here what's in it for you though following glycol i believe that every single individual human being should probably make their own peace with the universe i mean we're all others different emotionally we're all different physically intellectually it would be really odd if we were all the same spiritually so i mean that's why i have a problem with religion per se because religion the very word it comes from the same root word as ligature and ligament and it means to be bound together in one belief which i find a bit creepy and a bit unnatural how did you first go about um worshiping glycon and what form does the worship take well when i started to become interested in magic i understood that everything that people talk about with regard to magic is all absolutely true as long as you understand that it is happening inside people's minds and it struck me that that must be what magic is it must be like treating the space that we perceive inside our minds as a kind of territory and i thought that working on that hypothesis you could explore that territory you can't have that conversation with a christian fundamentalist i mean really just fundamentalism it's a bit of a misnomer because if you actually look back at the foundations of christianity you find that the thinking is a lot more flexible yeah the kind of what we call fundamentalism these days it's basically entirely based upon 1930's tent show revivalism right it goes back no further than about 80 years and yet it's a very frightening and dangerous mindset because i mean as far as i understand it at the moment there are genuine worries that certainly in america that this could actually negate science but it could drag us back into a new dark ages and it informs policy absolutely well i mean if you've got sort of um self-confessed fundamentalists at the top seats of government that surely kind of threatens the separation of church and state that you think keeping religion out of politics is still considered good form at least in britain it is we don't pray together for example no we don't pray together jeremy no our prime minister may not like to talk about how his faith informs his politics but his friend george has no such misgivings he starts each day at the white house with a bible class what would be the policies of a nation marching under the flag of glycon but the name means apparently it means sweetie it's really nice yeah it's just called sweetie i suppose that sweetness and good hair would be the main qualities that i'd look for and enlightenment and they're all qualities which you embody absolutely and the smugness as well i'd like to see a bit more of that around whether you worship a puppet snake or a man from bethlehem who could make a loaf feed more people than it could reasonably be expected to somehow in an increasingly multicultural multi-faith society we're all going to have to learn to get on so why is it that government initiatives seem designed to increasingly segregate children on the basis of their parents religious beliefs the public are opposed to discriminating against children on the basis of their religion or their parents religion pretend or otherwise and opposed to the segregation of children on racial and religious grounds that that causes so there's an overwhelming majority against that but we have an extremely conservative government that thinks that there's that it's a good thing to do despite that because it wants to keep well in with the faith i'm delighted to have the opportunity today to pay tribute to faith works and the work which you as churches and christian organizations undertaken communities up and down the country the decision to not just permit faith schools but to actively promote them comes from on high i know why they did it i mean partly because not just because tony blair is himself religious and sends his children to religious schools but david blunkett who i think isn't particularly religious said when he was education secretary i'd like to bottle the magic that faith schools have what he meant is he saw faith schools being very orderly often in very poor areas faith schools often have you know the best behaved kids they quite often have better results because they screen out the chaotic families by definition they're operating a a different sort of selection procedure so you're not obliged to have to deal with pupils or families that might bring your batting average down basically absolutely they're not going to be the families of drug addicts and of of depressives and people with serious problems alcoholics and all the rest of it um so they end up being what's called the best schools that's because they've got the good kids and ministers mistake that and think there's some magic about the fact it's religious the only magic is selection and while the majority of british people have left religious belief behind the chances of our children avoiding having faith presented to them as fact are slim and getting slimmer hamish renfrew a parent and non-believer had to ask his child school to allow her to skip religious education he encountered resistance to his attempts to question the way religion was taught as an unconditional truth at her school and was disappointed that non-belief was not an educational option he now campaigns on behalf of the national secular society first term four and a half years old i get back a piece of paper which says under knowledge and understanding i think a kind of inappropriate title in re the children will learn the importance of baptism with a capital b right i am unbaptized my wife is unbaptized my daughter is unbaptized and unless she chooses to change her mind as an adult will remain so what's wrong with teaching them about baptism you know per se i mean it's it's part of social traditions i i agree there is there's nothing wrong in teaching baptism as a function done by certain people in a certain religion but that's not what this was this was the importance of baptism with a capital b we're talking george w bush and his cohorts here i've worked in texas and other southern states i've seen those kind of baptists right and they scare me with less a lot of people feel the same a lot of parents are very distraught when they find in their area they may have a choice between two different faith schools as catholic a church of england maybe in some areas a muslim school or between a girl's school under boys school and they don't have a chance of what most people want which is a mixed non-denominational school i have no religion i consider myself undiluted now there is no teaching of the fact that you don't have to have religion it's rather like soccer it's which team do you support not do you like soccer yeah do you get very fed up with that presumption yeah particularly from cab drivers if there's anyone well it this is the problem and i think the problem for the politicians is that if you are a manchester united supporter or a chelsea supporter and we can appeal to that caucus you will vote for me right if your church of england or islam or whatever you've put yourself in a box that the politicians can drag where they want you to be they don't have to address individuals who can think for themselves and i think individuals can think for themselves as probably the biggest fear that a modern politician has what really disturbs hamish is that when religion is taught in school the line between reality and make-believe fact and faith is often blurred at christmas my daughter five is doing christmas play it was the night before christmas they called me into the school they gave me the script i said no no take it home you know check everything make sure that you're comfortable with it i said it's fine it's a play it's pretend when she's 14 if you want to cast her as lady macbeth i won't actually think you're getting her to incite someone to murder it's a play and she said well you're being very reasonable about that but we tried a couple of years ago to do something for diwali and we had christian parents in saying i'm not having my child use those words say those things and because of that experience we have to run this past you that's the sort of censorship that's happening in this that's the kind of crush of any sort of non-religious viewpoint that i object to so strongly don't you think that um there should be religious education of some sort in schools because it's it's partly that would partly help to defuse any problems if people at least understood each other's cultures oh and religious education is very important and for one thing just for cultural reasons but how could you understand jerry springer the opera unless you need the stories but it is weird getting accused of blasphemy i don't know if any of you have ever been formally accused of blasphemy but i always relieve when people laugh at that idea because everywhere around the country hey i don't know if any of you have ever been accused of blasphemy people go ah no be ridiculous except in uh bill f wells don't imagine that my contribution to jerry springer the opera means i'm against all aspects of religion i don't think you should throw the baby out with a bath water especially if you're babysitting and there are few better tools for understanding human experience and the rich heritage of stories like the christian myth seen here handed down to us by the world's fates why is it important then to be allowed to comment on criticize and yes laugh at religion at best religions have inspired some of the greatest music literature and art in history and provided a mythopoetic framework for our finest ideals hopes and values at their worst religions have been used to excuse the most vicious aspects of human nature legitimizing persecution genocide slavery and war when religions embody immorality and irrationality they must be open to criticism communities often are silent about some of the bad things that happen inside them and once you close down open debate you in fact inhibit particularly women from coming forward to speak about bad things that are done to them so i'm very against the idea that somehow we close down debate in respect for religion because i actually think religion like every other belief system has to be out there to be examined and to be examined in some of the ways that it does bad things to others i don't think that i should be censored from going into areas that some people may find offensive if i have a very good and coherent argument for why it's okay to do it so here we are back where we started looking at christians for testing about jerry springer the opera in liverpool the right to stage a comic opera which allegedly features jesus in nappies but never actually has done ever may seem like a fairly trivial issue but it has implications as to the extent to which we're prepared to accommodate the views of people who draw their inspiration from faith this production not only undermines the authority of god but it undermines the divinity of the godhead in an increasingly complex world perhaps it's better to look towards more tangible certainties it may seem like reckless behavior but wouldn't it be nice to dream of a society where belief was no obstruction to dialogue you know how they say some things in life are bad they can really in 1979 the british board of film censorship ruled that 14 year olds could see the life of brian agreeing that the average teenager could tell the difference between provocative satire and gratuitous insult nearly 30 years later are we really going to let the new puritans do our thinking for us in the meantime if it all gets too much don't grumble give a whistle and this will help things turn out for the best and always look on the light side of life not quite the bright side next tonight i look back at the ice storm that devastated montreal a perfect disaster or is there worse still to come

Channel: no data available

Views: 689,126

Rating: 4.8589211 out of 5

Keywords: jerry springer the opera, blasphemy, bbc, channel 5

Id: N9EUe8jNr6o

Length: 38min 59sec (2339 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 16 2012

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

Good documentary. Stewart Lee can be very good, but I have to be in the right mood to watch him. You should x-post this in /r/atheistvids.

My favourite line:

"There was talk of the composer and I being prosecuted for blasphemy, but ultimately the case was not pursued, presumably on the grounds that it isn't 1508".