UK's BBC nervous about screening "Popetown" cartoon

[emad]

BBC axe falls on Catholic cartoon
Nicholas Hellen and Christopher Morgan


<snip>
THE BBC has retreated under sustained pressure from the Roman Catholic Church to drop an “offensive” television cartoon, which features corrupt cardinals and an infantile Pope on a pogo stick.
This weekend it declined to confirm that the cartoon, Popetown, with a reported cost of more than £2m, would be broadcast. BBC executives close to the project, however, claim it has been quietly axed.
......

In its original announcement of the cartoon in November 2002, the BBC seemed determined to cause offence. It described the “insane and chaotic bureaucracy of Popetown, where cardinals are sinister, corrupt and mysteriously wealthy, and the Pope is a . . . childish 77-year-old whose every fickle whim must be indulged”.

The cartoon was to have been broadcast last autumn on BBC Three, with a later re-run on BBC Two. Stuart Murphy, controller of BBC Three, had announced the programme, saying: “Having had a Catholic upbringing myself, I believe Jerry Hall will make an excellent nun, and hope Ruby Wax, being Jewish and female, may bring something to the role of the Pope which the Catholic Church may have so far overlooked.”
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A BBC spokeswoman said last night that because the producers had not seen the final version of the programme, no decision had been made over whether or not to broadcast it.

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More:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,176-1070728,00.html

I guess Cardinal Marcinkus must be feeling pretty sore at the thought of a UK cartoon exposing his massive, unaccounted for wealth following the collapse of Banco Ambrosiano......

The murder trial of "God's Banker" Roberto Calvi resumes in Italy on April 22 following the seizure of £70 million of "lost" Ambrosiano funds by City of London Police in the Bahamas earlier this year and the submission of a huge cache of intelligence files by UK Police and MI5 to the Italian prosecutors......

Who says satire is dead??????????

[Fenris]

1. Roberto Calvi? Is he the one someone strung up over Blackfriar's Bridge?

I seem to remember that he angered the wrong people.

[Waverley_Hills_Hiker]

2. Popetown sounds more like the Bush adminstration..

..the Pope= Bush.

Sinister Cardinal = Cheney (and their is a bit of Richeleau to him, isn there?)