Street cred

I know that not all people who watch the long-running British soap Coronation Street are thick, but some of them must be.

Why else would they complain that a character – not a real person, but a character – seems to be having a go at Christians, as we see from this Daily Express tale?

Viewers complained after Street veteran Ken Barlow, played by Bill Roache, said Christians forced their views on “vulnerable people”.

At one point Ken accused his grandson Simon’s school of indoctrinating him, before vowing to tell the youngster “the truth” about religion.

The regulator Ofcom has received “dozens of complaints”, says the story.

You can bet your bottom they’re all from Christians. One moron on the ITV1 message board said, “In case it has escaped the minds of the writers, producers and directors of this extremely popular programme, in the last census over 70 per cent of respondents claimed to have some Christian adherence.”

Your point being? Most people don’t like Hitler, but they don’t write to a film company if, say, Hermann Göring is depicted praising him in any given scene of a movie about him. They don’t write to the producers of a TV cop drama if the baddy is badmouthing the goody.

Ken Barlow is a character. Let’s just shout that a bit: Ken Barlow is a character – a CHARACTER.

Just like real people, characters in TV drama have opinions.

Another message read, “To choose this script on the most holy day in the Christian calendar is insulting and greatly offensive.”

Er, hang on a mo. Like most soaps, Corrie follows the calendar. Easter Sunday in the real world was also Easter Sunday in Coronation Street. Events in people’s lives tend to provoke comments on those events.

When Barlow said (and you can see another version of the story here on the BBC website) that Jesus’s rising from the dead “may not necessarily be true” and that scientists think the Big Bang created the universe, he was clearly saying this because the story was smack bang in the middle of a particular day in the Christian calendar.

And they’d all been to church. Isn’t it natural that people who do something then go on to talk about it?

Barlow said at another point, apparently, that he believed “children should be told the truth” and that Christianity was comforting because “that’s how they get their hooks into you, when you’re vulnerable”.

It's just conversation between characters, but crazy Christians can't stand it.

What are you people on? Go and get a life, FFS!