And now it's precisely 20:27!

 It's nearly 2026!

Away In a Culture War

In England, complaining about the Post Office’s commemorative stamps is almost as important a Christmas tradition as the sending of cards. This year’s stamps seem particularly innocuous: slightly abstracted illustrations of the traditional nativity story characters. 

Nowadays we have Big Stamps and Small Stamps to go on Big Letters and Small Letters: so the big second class is an angel and the small second class is Mary and Joseph; the first class stamps have Mary and the Baby Jesus and the shepherds, respectively, on them. The Wise Men get a £3.40 stamp to themselves. That’s the flat rate for sending cards air-mail anywhere in the world, apparently. It’s all a bit irrelevant because everyone uses Amazon and Moon-Pig.

I think the pictures are intended to suggest a kind of collage: Mary’s robe is a single, two-dimensional block of patterned fabric or paper. Mary and Joseph are riding a donkey; one of the three shepherds is bringing a lamb as a gift; and there are specifically three wise men, who seem to be wearing crowns. Those details owe more to Victorian carols than to the actual gospels, but then so does the whole popular nativity tradition. All of the pictures have a starry, starry background, and there is one big yonder star for we three kings to follow. Mary and the Baby have halos.

So far, so nice. But all eleven figures have dark skins. And Mary is wearing some sort of head-covering. So naturally the usual suspects have crawled out of the woodwork to say that the stamps are anti-white propaganda, the most Muslim Christmas stamps ever, and to chant about the halo looking like a crescent moon. Which it does, a bit, if you squint.

Well: Bethlehem was in modern Palestine and Nazareth was in modern Israel. The Maguses came “from the East”, which would be modern Iraq, and the idea that they were Persians or Babylonians fits the story pretty well. None of these people were white Europeans. Unless you are going with the legendary Wee Three Kings: then I suppose there is a quite well established tradition that one was European, one was Asian and one was African. That probably represents the idea that the rulers of the whole world came to pay their respects to Jesus.

But I don’t think the Post Office’s artist was shooting for historical accuracy: the clothes certainly aren’t based on first century garb. I think—at any rate, I hope—that he drew them that way specifically in order to annoy the sorts of people who are, in fact, annoyed that he drew them in that way. We are living at a time when a resurgent Christian Nationalist sect is systematically othering brown-skinned people, and celebrating a shield-bearing crusader Christ. So of course every piece of artwork, every carol service and every nativity play should make the point—be it ever so subtly—that in the story, Jesus was not one of us: he was one of them.

Yes: Christians have always localised the story. Art galleries are full of paintings of renaissance noble women giving birth in rather clean fifteenth century sheds. The Mystery Plays showed Caesar ordering the whole world to attend a census—even if they live as far away as Barnsley or Rotherham! Whisper it softly: African churches sometimes imagine African Jesuses, and black children sometimes hang their stockings out for a Black Santa. In any other year, a white baby would have been quite unobjectionable. 

But if you are living in 1930s Germany, it is incumbent on you to make the point that, as a matter of historical fact, Mary and Joseph were Jewish.

*

Roderick Spode’s Christmas-themed rally is, in the grand scheme of things, merely absurd. A thousand black-shorts singing Away in a Manger at an open air carol service should scarcely register as a news item. Every city in England has a thousand-seater cathedral and every one of those cathedrals will be standing room only for multiple iterations of Christmas carols during the festive period. It is all very well to want to demonstrate your commitment to faith and homeland, or, indeed, to be a shining beacon of light against the fading of our cultural identity. It is slightly odd to do so by doing exactly what nearly everyone up and down the country was going to be doing in any case.

But I found some of the discussion around the non-event rather interesting.

If you were a very devout vegetarian, you might, I suppose, refuse to acknowledge the distinction between chicken, pork, and beef and refer to them all as “meat”. Or, indeed, “dead animals”. But it might prove problematic to fry beef in Col Sanders eleven spices, or to make a chicken wellington. Words usually mean things, and definitions usually include some things and exclude others.

In 1979, the Monty Python team released a highly successful mind-virus which causes carriers to believe that all disagreements about religion or politics are intrinsically ridiculous. It wouldn’t be funny if there wasn't some truth in it. In any political movement or church or fandom there really will sometimes be bitter disagreements about matters which seem trivial to anyone outside the cult. Or in some cases, matters which are really genuinely trivial. But as a result of the mind virus, whenever anyone asserts a point of principle on any subject, there will invariably be a wiseacre on hand to mutter “popular front of Judea” as if that terminated the discussion.

If we ask whether or not Spode is "really" a "Christian" are we indulging in that kind of sectarian hair-splitting? We have, I think, a perfect right to be skeptical about any sudden conversion. The man in the pew, and indeed in the pulpit, could be forgiven for asking if the man who has knelt down with a thousand other people in a crowded football stadium (while Cliff Richard is belting out Blessed Assurance with a Pentecostal choir) had in any meaningful sense "turned to Jesus". Billy Graham himself used to play down claims that so-many-thousands of people had been “saved” at one of his evangelistic meetings. They came forward, he would say: only God knows if they were saved. 

But in this case there is a more specific skepticism because of a perceived mis-match between Spode’s new-found faith and his political beliefs. Someone suggested that he was “about as Christlike as a traffic cone full of angry wasps.”

Possibly. But if the criteria for genuine conversion is Christosimilitude then I should say we are looking at roughly two thousand years of false conversions, with Spode falling only slightly shorter than everyone else. All the popular candidates for "Christlikeness"—Mother Theresa, say, or Saint Francis, or Desmond Tutu, or John Paul the Second—have their detractors. The Catholic Church maintains a list of around ten thousand people who it thinks quite definitely went to heaven, but there are some odd people on it. Actually having existed has not always been an essential criteria for canonisation. 

Our good friend CS Lewis was once asked if there was such a thing as a non-practicing Christian. He said yes, in fact nearly all Christians were non-practicing. The only person who ever practiced Christianity perfectly was Jesus himself. Lewis's definition of “practice” was quite specific: 

“It means that every single act and feeling, every experience, whether pleasant or unpleasant, must be referred to God. It means looking at everything… and saying ‘How would He wish me to deal with this?’”

Which is a pretty high bar to clear.

A nice sounding Anglican clergyman (a part time comedian and former Satanist, apparently) wrote in the Guardian that:

"Jesus was very clear that none of us is in a position to judge each other, so I’m generally loth to pronounce anyone 'not a real Christian'".

Which is very charitable of him. But he goes on to say that “care for the most vulnerable in society” has always been the core Christian value, and that Spode’s followers might have an issue with (for example) the passages in Exodus which exhort Jews to be nice to foreigners and immigrants because they were foreigners and immigrants in Egypt. Perfectly good point, that. But it does rather make it sound as if Christianity is a social movement and that there is a suspicion that Spode is not fully on board with the programme. The headline to the opinion column, presumably added by a sub, stated that there is no sense in which someone like Spode could be considered a genuine Christian. None. 

The same paper carried an extended essay by an American, Bill McKibben, bewailing the way in which, in his country, the far-Right has co-opted Christianity.

According to this essay, in the 1950s and 1960s the overwhelming majority of American Christians believed in a broadly liberal Jesus. As the decades wore on, a re-branded fundamentalism which conflated Christianity with a narrow range of conservative causes came to dominate the protestant church, to the point where opposing abortion and homosexuality had become almost the whole of the faith.

At the end of the 1950s, he writes:

“a cool 52% of Americans were part of the so-called mainline denominations: Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Episcopalians and the like. That meant most of the nation subscribed at least nominally to a religious life marked by a kind of polite civic normality and a somewhat progressive reading of the Bible….”

The mainline Jesus was “a baby born to homeless parents in a garage”:

“The baby grows up in humble circumstances, a working carpenter; his message is about love for others, especially for the poor—and not a sentimental love, but a concrete one, expressed by feeding and sheltering. Christ’s response to violence is to turn the other cheek—not as an act of passive acceptance, but as a way to educate the attacker; his crime policy is that if someone steals your coat you should give him your sweater too.” 

"Not as an act of passive acceptance" is an interpretation of the text, incidentally: not what it literally says. Jesus's parents were "homeless" in so far as they were not in their home town and couldn't find a hotel: they weren't destitute. 

McKibben seems to take it for granted that sweater-sharing and cheek-turning would naturally be expected to get a person crucified. I don't buy this. It is a good joke to say that Jesus was nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, but it doesn't make much historical sense. Bart Ehrman has written that any convincing reconstruction of Jesus has to be able to answer the question "Why did he get the death penalty?" I don't think "For being nice" is a plausible answer. 

McKibben goes on to say that it is “entirely fine” to believe in a Jesus-story shorn of its supernatural elements: it's all about the message. Any talk of "resurrection" seems to be a round-about way of saying that the preaching wasn't forgotten when the preacher died:  

“This person’s message is sufficiently subversive that he is eventually put to death by the reigning imperial power, but that execution is powerless to quell his spirit or his message, which then spreads across a growing community of followers who try to behave as he had.”

It was Jesus' message—not any faith the he had literally come back to life—that the Church preserved: it was Jesus behaviour that they sought to emulate. When workin' folk are out on strike, that's where you'll find Joe Hill. 

“The idea that personal salvation—as opposed to concern for others—was at the heart of Christianity always bordered on the heretical…”

Really? Did mainline Methodists and Lutherans in the 1950s really believe that Wesley and Luther—not to mention St John and St Paul—were borderline heretics? I find it hard to believe that this could literally have been the case. A hymn-book full of far away green hills and rugged old crosses says differently. 

But let’s take him at his word. For the first half of the 20th century, the American church had substantially abandoned the New Testament’s divine saviour in favour of a humble rabbi. America may have been colonised by puritan extremists, but its civil system was created by skeptical deists. Didn’t Thomas Jefferson go through the Bible and tear out all the religious bits? So perhaps the proposition isn't as absurd as all that.

If the liberal consensus only arrived at their ethical Jesus by denouncing the Christ of the New Testament, then the evangelicals have done nothing worse than restore the church's historic faith. They have literally put the Christ back into Christianity. But their restored Christ is a macho culture warrior with a gun in one hand and a spanking paddle in the other.

How should we understand this? Should we say "In the 21st century, a large cohort of Americans rejected the purely ethical Jesus and restored the theological Christ: and it just so happened that most of them were hard-line political conservatives?" 

Or are we obliged to say that "the Christ of Christianity and the ideology of the far-Right go together like a horse and carriage?"

Plenty of anti-theists would gleefully go along with the second option. Once you overwrite the humble rabbi with God’s supernatural offspring, you have already committed yourself to a whole complex of authoritarian and patriarchal ideas. If you replace the jobbing carpenter with a divine world-saviour, you have opened the door to some very unhealthy ideas about divine retribution. Have you ever seen Passion of the Christ? In a church which preaches that version of the Atonement, James Dobson and John Smyth are features rather than bugs.

CS Lewis, again, argued rather cogently that you couldn’t and shouldn’t have a “Christian” political party—let alone a “Christian” government—because Christians don’t necessarily agree about all the nitty-gritty bread-and-butter political questions. What would be desirable would be a strong Christian presence in all the parties. 

He thinks that you could perfectly well have a sincere Christian fascist and an equally sincere Christian communist—or at any rate, sincere Christians prepared to make common cause with the British Union of Fascists and equally sincere Christians willing to ally with the British Communist Party. The hypothetical Christian fascist might think that humans were so sinful that they need to be governed by a theocratic dictatorship. The hypothetical Christian communist might believe Jesus was primarily a social reformer and that the church departed at a very early stage from his teachings. That is, the Christian fascist misapplied and exaggerated doctrines which Lewis thought were sound; but the Christian communist worked from premises that Lewis utterly rejected.

So, it seems we have a consensus. All parties are agreed that if you believe in the Christ of theology, you are more or less bound to be a conservative; and that if you are a liberal, you are more or less bound to believe in a non-theological Jesus. Your only options are to embrace the Republican Christ, or else assert that since Saul of Tarsus tripped over his shoelace on the way to Damascus, there have been hardly any True Christians. 

In order to test my hypothesis, I turned to an online magazine called Christian Today. I think it would be fair to describe this publication as a bit on the socially conservative side. A representative sample runs thus: 

“The judgement of God has finally come upon the United Kingdom. Quietly. Silently. Like a thief in the night. It came in the form of an irrational, emotive and Godless parliament who this week voted to permit the killing of babies in the womb up until birth, and has now introduced the National Suicide Service, with its vote to permit assisted suicide. God has given us what we voted for.”

The magazine tries to navigate a "both sides" critique of Spode and his opponents. A sub-headline directs our attention to the parable of the mote and the beam. Aren't both sides, the far-Right and the anti-fascist, guilty of co-opting the Christian message to their political beliefs? Aren't both sides equally prone to demonise their opponents? When the liberals speak of Spode as if he was some kind of anti-Christ, aren't they guilty of the very same divisiveness they accuse him of? 

The essay acknowledges that there are valid criticisms of the Unite the Kingdom rally: that it illegitimately shoe-horns politics into Christmas. But they note that an anti-fascist counter meeting depicted Mary and Joseph in a refugee boat. Surely that is also political? And therefore just as bad? The Left should not demonise the Right over what is, after all, a mere difference of political opinion. (This approach does not, of course, apply to questions about assisted dying and legalised abortion: it is perfectly okay to demonise people who disagree with you about that.)

But the Left are far more culpable than the Right in this regard. The Right may have introduced politics into religion; but the Left have replaced religion with politics. The established church has been reduced to a party political mouthpiece: 

"It used to be said that the Church of England was the Tory party at prayer. Now it seems more accurate to describe it as the Green/Labour/Progressive party at politics."

Well: when people said that the Church was the Tory party at prayer, I think they meant that Conservatives generally worshipped at their parish church, where Labour voters were more likely to attend one of the non-conformist denominations. The Labour party owed more to Methodism than to Marx. No-one, I think, ever claimed that the Church of England consistently supported Conservative party policy.

The Guardian writer said directly that there was a consensus in liberal churches that a gospel of salvation was heretical. The Christian Today article accuses church leaders of being unable to tell their flock "what God says about salvation", preferring instead to claim divine authority for their personal beliefs about "the EU, immigration, climate change and Donald Trump!" 

The Guardian writer said that Christmas is about "a baby born to homeless parents in a garage”. Which rather reminds one of Geraldine Granger telling the good folk of Dibley that the Christmas story was about a baby born in a stable ("the poorest of the poor") who "says things that are so astonishing that millions of people are still living their lives by them today." So Christian Today is being perfectly fair when it hauls liberals over the coals for reducing the meaning of Christmas to "let's all be nice to each other because a cute baby was born to a teenage mum and became a refugee."

So perhaps Christmas does belong to the Conservative Christ much more than to the liberal Jesus. The baby in the Nativity story is not a humble carpenter with some new-age theories about love. Like Harry Potter and Anakin Skywalker, he's the Chosen One. As a baby, he is celebrated by a whole army of supernatural beings. As a young child he is venerated by all the Kings of the world. The Right can validly claim that by abolishing the liberal Jesus, they have put the Christ back in Christmas.  

The Christian Today essay ends with another attempt to be even-handed—offering prayers for both the Right and the Left, the Spodests and the liberal Church Leaders. But the writer 

“prays that Christ will really be exalted in [the Unite the Kingdom] carol service in London on Saturday” 

adding that 

“I suspect that I would be more likely to hear the actual gospel of Christ at the rally on Saturday, than I will in some churches on Sunday.” 

Whereas he prays that the Left 

“will stop using their own personal Jesus for their own personal politics and instead come to know and proclaim the Christ who really is there.”

Is this where we are? The Far-Right have the wrong politics, but the correct Jesus? The Liberals have only politics; they don't have Jesus at all? It sounds depressingly like the English Civil War, in which one side was Romantic But Wrong, and the other side were Rotten But Right. 

*

In the 1980s, a rumour occasionally went round campus that the GaySoc had decreed that on such-and-such a day; homosexual students would identify themselves by wearing blue jeans to lectures and straight students by wearing something else. I don’t suppose it was actually true: but it was quite a clever thought experiment. Everybody wore blue jeans all the time. So the question was "If I wear my Levis tomorrow, will everyone assume I am gay? And if they do, does that matter, particularly?"

If everyone agreed that wearing red baseball caps represented my support for Roderick Spode then I would not wear a red base ball cap ever again. Not that I was planning to do so in any case. If I watch the new TV show about the kid with the magic wand, it will be widely taken as signifying my assent to the proposition that my trans friends shouldn’t be allowed to go to the lavatory. So I won't: although I probably wouldn't have done anyway. 

I accept that we may have to cede the Union Jack to the far-Right. I will be quite sad if Christmas goes the same way: but I expect that it will. The more people tell me that I must say Happy Christmas and that saying Happy Christmas signifies my opposition to the Woke war on Christmas, the more inclined I am to say Season’s Greetings or Happy Holidays. 

This year, it is one rather ludicrous man saying that we should all get together and sing Away in a Manger in order to assert our national identity and resist cultural erosion. Next year, the thought may creep into actual churches. Five years down the line, there may be general agreement that singing Away in a Manger is what we do to stick it to the brown folk. In which case, all us non-fascists will have to stop singing it. Which would be a shame. But we managed without the song from the first year of the Christian era through to, I think, the one thousand eight hundred and seventy eighth. Go back to the eighteenth century, and you'd find people struggling through December the twenty-fifth without Silent Night, turkey, Santa Claus or the Muppet Christmas Carol. I think we’ll cope.

But what happens when Spodist converts start to attend ordinary services? What is the Rev. to do? 

Perhaps he will say “We welcome everyone—money-lenders, pedophiles, Nazis, people who saw Monty Python's, Life of Brian….” and continue preaching whatever message he was going to preach in any case. In which case I suppose the Spodists would say that the Vicar, like the Archbishop of Canterbury, the King and the Pope were Woke. Liberals may be reluctant to say that people who don't agree with them are Not True Christians; the Right have no such compunctions. 

So what is Rev. to do? Stick to his pacifist guns, watch the Christian Nationalists drift away and lament his pews returning to their previous bum-free status?

Or experience a sudden revelation that the core of Jesus message was always white-ethno-nationalist-anti-Islamiscism?

In 2015, it would not have been possible to imagine a British Conservative leader using the language that Badenoch does—and completely impossible to imagine a Labour leader talking like Starmer. Who knows where the Overton stained glass window might be in 2030?

I take it for granted that, by then, either Spode or someone more extreme will have kissed King Charles's ring. And the church, like the schools and the museums, will have to choose between bending the knee to the Party or being disestablished or abolished. 

At which point, carol services will be the least of our worries

Happy New Year.


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NOTE: Trigger Happy

One of the 2,400 comments under the Daily Mail's piece about Julian Clary sometimes telling blue jokes is a helpful comment by "Gadgetman".

Not funny anymore due to the depressing woke leftist brigade.

Well, quite.

Triggers are wonderful things...

 I know this will look like a set up, but I honestly didn't plan it.

Several hon. members "Oh yes you did!"

Self: "Oh no I didn't!"

In yesterday's screed, I briefly mentioned the Palladium's Christmas pantomime, Sleeping Beauty. I noted that the show's website mentioned that it "contained innuendo". 

Different people have different opinions about smutty jokes. Kenneth Williams said that if he was given a script to read and found that it contained a double entendre, he whipped it out. The other day at the Sea Shanty session, a lady asked me for a song that contained a lot of innuendo. So I gave her one. It was an old music-hall number about a farmer purchasing a male hen from the market. I thought long and hard before singing it. 

Self: "So, what happened to my career as a serious cultural commentator?"

Several hon. members: "It's behind you!"

I positively like pantomime, in small doses. The annual pie-in-the-face routine. The shoe-horning of that year's pop songs and some forgotten music hall number into a plot borrowed from Grimm or the Arabian Nights. The moment when the right hand side of the auditorium has to try and sing louder than the left hand side of the auditorium. The assurance that we are the best Friday night audience they've had all week. The haunted house routine during which Snow White or Cinderella is followed around the stage by ghosties and ghoulies. ("I don't want to be caught by the ghosties" "Well, I don't want to be caught by the....") 

The last few pantos I've seen in Bristol and Bath actually contained very few over-the-kids-heads dirty jokes. Dick Whittington contained one, count it, one joke about the principle boy's first name. (Another character was interrupted while singing a Christmas song. "Chestnuts roasting on an open fire; Jack Frost nipping at my..." "Dick!") What I did notice was a lot of very child-friendly scatological humour (poo jokes) which have of course become much more acceptable in mainstream juvenile fiction, what with Captain Underpants and all that. ("I was banned from Bristol swimming baths for having a wee in the pool." "Oh, that's a bit harsh, we've all done that...." "Yes, but not from the top diving board.") 

But the Palladium show starred Julian Clary, self-described "renowned homosexual"; he of the "fisting Norman Lamont" remark ("talk about a red box"). So perhaps the smut-o-meter went further into the blue than it would have done in the Westuv England. Catherine Tate's material isn't always one hundred per cent clean, either.

But if we are to believe the Daily Mail, and why shouldn't we, it didn't go down terribly well with the audience. 

Fans WALK OUT of Catherine Tate's smutfest panto!

Metro concurs: 

Families walk out of Catherine Tate panto after branding it a smutfest. 

Both stories seem to be substantially based on TripAdviser quotes: the majority of which are less bothered about the rudery and more concerned that it wasn't very funny. None of the quotes point to a specific incident of anyone walking out, although it is mentioned that on one night there was, shockingly, no standing ovation. Neither paper can point to any risque joke in particular, but the blurb on the show's website leaves us in no doubt as to the likely tone of the evening: 

"The West End’s biggest Christmas show....with that age-old fairytale message: whilst one small prick can be deadly, at The London Palladium you’re promised the happiest of endings."

I believe that last year Julian Clary entered the stage on board a full sized fire-engine and immediately made a remark about his "hose". 

But it does genuinely seem that some of the families involved may have purchased the very expensive tickets without quite realising what kind of a show it was. The Metro piece notes that "The modern retelling of the classic fairytale is shown at family-friendly times of 2:30pm and 7:30pm at the theatre" where the Daily Mail says that "Customers expected a family-friendly affair given the show times of 2.30pm and 7.30pm". 

Metro cites a disgruntled customer saying "‘Sadly I didn’t realise this was an ‘adult style’ panto."

Didn't you? Well, in that case, I can see how you might be perturbed. 

What a pity no-one thought to issue a trigger warning. 

The Wonderful Thing About Triggers

CONTENT WARNING: May contain the Daily Mail.

Is it a good idea to inform punters about the contents of a movie or a play before they buy a ticket for it?

Maybe. Maybe not. It certainly can't do any harm. Some people really, really, don’t like to see a man with no clothes on; so putting up a little notice that says “This exhibition includes some paintings of men with no clothes on” seems like simple good manners. Of course, you can smirk slightly if the notice is outside an exhibition entitled Classic Renaissance Nudes. We used to smirk when we found that a product called Just Nuts had a sticker on it saying “May contain nuts”. But I reckon it’s the sort of silliness society can probably survive. Someone might go and see Equus honestly thinking it was a play about horse racing. Someone else might have seen the trailer for Pillion and thought it was mostly about motorcycles. Not everyone knew that the opening scene of the National Theatre’s Frankenstein would include parts of Benedict Cumberbatch which were not normally on public display.

You might think that it would be a better world if no-one was bothered about the unclothed human body. And members of the naturist community might well say “Yeah? Well maybe I am offended by all the people in Baywatch wearing unnecessary swimming costumes?” But I think there’s a pretty wide consensus about what people are and aren’t bothered by. You might point out that the screenplay of this week’s movie included the word “cunt”; you probably wouldn’t mention that it contained the word “nasturtium”. It’s not a hard one to navigate, and in no sensible world would it become a politicising issue.

So, in November, the Daily Mail printed a headline which ran “Theatre blasted as woke after ‘slapping trigger warning on musical Jesus Christ Superstar because it depicts the crucifixion’”.

Well, people going to see Jesus Christ Superstar must logically fall into one of two groups:

Group One: People who already know what happens in the show.

Group Two: People who don’t already know what happens in the show.

Group Two might contain foreigners, Martians and friends of Prof. Richard Dawkins, who are completely unfamiliar with the Easter story. Don’t laugh, necessarily. When I saw the show in Bristol last year, I overheard some people in the interval who were unclear about who “the baddies” were. ("Er…The Jews, actually.") And some people on the way out were expressing disappointment at the down-beat ending. Knowledge of the story can’t be taken for granted any more. I myself saw Mahabharata without having the faintest idea what the Bhagavad Gita was. 

But Group Two might also contain an awful lot of people who did know the basic story, but who didn’t know that Superstar focuses entirely on the lead-up to Jesus’ death; and people who did know that it was basically a rocked up passion play, but didn’t realise that this particular production depicts the flogging and execution of Jesus in moderately graphic detail. And among that sub-group, there are presumably some people who are perfectly fine with watching fictionalised violence, and other people who are very bothered by it indeed. Conceivably, there could be refugees or ex-servicemen who have first hand experience of torture. There might well be abuse-survivors more generally. But there are also bound to be people who are just squicked out by fake blood and would prefer to spend their evening watching something else. Yes, theatre is meant to be shocking and unsettling, but tickets cost between £82 and £395 and Wicked is on next door.

The web-page for the Palladium includes a side-bar containing boilerplate information about access, age restrictions, and what happens if one of the celebrity cast is indisposed. Shockingly, a drop-down under “Content Warning” says that the show “Contains flashing lights and visual effects, pyrotechnics, theatrical smoke and haze, some violence, imitation blood, and an onstage depiction of the crucifixion.” This appears to be standard operating procedure for the London theatre: the sidebar for the panto (Sleeping Beauty) mentions that “parental discretion is advised due to innuendo”. This makes someone called Gerald furious: he thinks that if you warn theatre-goers that a musical contains violence, the next step will be to warn them that it contains catchy tunes. 

I think that from now on I may refer to this as Gerald's Fallacy: that if you can think of a stupid thing which is not being done, it follows that the sensible thing which is being done shouldn't be. But suppose you actually did put a small notice saying "Warning: May Contain Catchy Tunes" by the box office. Who, precisely, does Gerald suppose might be harmed?

If I were a director, I might possibly be annoyed by a content warning which said something like “Contains scenes in which the butler turns out to have dunnit.” This is a point on which good men can legitimately differ. Some people think that there is, or should be, no such thing as spoiler warnings. If knowing Luke’s dad was a toboggan ruins the movie, then the movie wasn’t worth seeing in the first place. Others say that the only point in going to the theatre or the movies is to discover how the story ends, so if the title of the piece is The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford or The Life and Most Piteous Death of King Richard the Second then the story is ruined before it starts. I believe I said at the time that the BBFC’s certificate at the beginning of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Frye telegraphed a significant “reveal” by stating that “suicide depiction” was one of the reasons for giving the movie a 12 Cert. It might be part of the director's plan to suddenly introduce a graphic axe murder into what appeared to be a harmless little “cosy crime” story. He might legitimately be cross if someone put up a sign saying "Warning: Contains unexpected axe murder." But someone else might think that the director had absolutely no business freaking out the paying customer in the name of artistic integrity. 

Jesus Christ Superstar is not setting out to shock anyone. The whole reason Gerald is furious is that he takes it for granted that anyone seeing the show must already knows that it contain nuts. So who does he think is being harmed? In Scenario One, every one knows what is in the musical so the warning is gratuitous: no harm done. In Scenario Two, some people don’t know what’s in the musical, but aren’t particularly bothered by it; so, again, no harm done. But in Scenario Three, some people didn’t know and do mind; and make an informed decision to spend their money elsewhere. In what possible world is this insane or staggering or infuriating or even, god help us, woke?

Over the last twelve months, the Daily Mail has published at least fifty stories in which “woke trigger warnings” are “slapped” on a wide variety of artistic works. The stories all follow roughly the same format:

"ITV is flooded with complaints after slapping 'woke' trigger warning on beloved 1970s sitcom"

"Tommy Cooper ITV compilation is hit with woke trigger warning over 'adult humour and outdated attitudes'"

"Doctor Who episode from 1969 is slapped with trigger warning amid complaints from readers show has gone 'woke'"

If you can be bothered to follow up the references, a rather less hysterical situation emerges. 

The ITV streaming service utilises a system of parental guidance. If a programme isn’t entirely innocuous, it puts a little G for Guidance by the listing, and a three or four word comment so Mum and Dad can decide if it’s appropriate for their offspring to watch it. Love Actually contains “very strong language and scenes of a sexual nature”; the Batman prequel Pennyworth contains “strong language, drugs and scenes of graphic violence”; but the old musical Grease (“the latest in a series of shows and movies to be slapped with a woke trigger warning”) has “mild language and teenaged misbehaviour”. It is in this context that The Best Of Tommy Cooper is said to have “Outdated attitudes”. 

This last guidance note has “sparked outrage from free speech campaigners and fans of the legendary comedian alike”. 

Has it? Has it really? 

Every movie or DVD released in the UK is given a rating by the British Board of Film Classification: only the most inoffensively harmless get a U. The majority of the classic era of Doctor Who is rated “U” (“infrequent very mild violence") or PG (“mild violence, threat”). The sacrilegious Russel T Davies colourisations are given slightly more in depth commentaries, presumably because they count as “new” movies. In the colourised Daleks—which has been rated “PG”—we are told that “a man punches another man but the blow is un-detailed” and that “a man dangles precariously from a rope in a sequence of sustained suspense”. (I would have written “remorseless tedium”.) The intention is clearly to reassure parents that while Doctor Who is a little bit more scary than, say, Peppa Pig (“no material likely to offend or harm”) it’s basically pretty tame and wholesome.

And this is clearly the context in which a warning has been "slapped" on the War Games. It is entirely clear that remarks about characters being “killed with fantastical weapons” and “questioned using fantastical interrogation machines” are there to reassure parents that although Doctor Who is a little bit violent, the violence is all in a harmless fantasy context. The BBFC point out that characters are “threatened with execution by firing squad” and that an American Civil War soldier uses a racist term (“boy”) in order to explain—if you want an explanation—why Doctor Who has got a PG cert (like Zootopia and Matilda) as opposed to a U (like Bluey and Tellytubbies).

The Daily Mail's language implies that these comedies and movies and stage plays have been singled out for special condemnation; that they have been slapped or hit by or handed or issued with a warning or reprimand: where in fact pretty much everything now comes with a brief description attached to it. And the rubrics are described as “Content Warning” or “Content Advice” or “Parental Guidance”. Trigger Warning is the Daily Mail’s own description.

The sidebar for the Royal Opera’s 2025 production of Puccini’s Tosca stated that it contained “depictions of executions, violence, blood, gore, murder, sexual assault, implied torture and suicide”. Rita Skeeter’s Quick-Notes-Quill transmogrifies this into “It carries eight trigger warnings relating to murder, sexual assault and torture. So far, so woke.”

The Mail's piece continues: “But now comes a trigger warning with a difference: for the venue is now alerting its audiences to – horror of horrors – the curtain-up bell.”

Up to a point, Lord Rothermore. On the Royal Opera House’s website, there is a menu called Your Visit, and on that menu there is an item called Accessibility. On the Accessibility page, there is information about an Access Scheme, Relaxed Performances, Audio Descriptions and Touch Tours for the visually impaired; wheelchair accessible toilets and step-free access. And towards the bottom of the page, you will indeed find the following:

“The Royal Opera House is a large building with many floors, lifts, escalators, corridors and open spaces….

….Lighting and sounds also vary depending on where you are in the building, with public areas being brightly lit and noisy, while the areas around the stages are dimly lit.

A handheld bell is rung by Front of House staff to signal guests to take their seats before a performance. The bell is loud and can be startling. The bell is rung approximately ten minutes before the show starts and at each interval.”

How could any sensible person object to this innocuous piece of small print? 

And how could anyone infer that there is an ulterior, left-wing (“woke”) motive behind it?

I toyed with the possibility that what was being objected to is the whole idea of "accessibility" in general, as opposed to the bell warning in particular. Is it possible that what lay behind the complaint was a wider scepticism about the whole idea of illness and disability? Does the writer of the article believe that most disabled people are not really ill; or that even if they are, the able-bodied community has no business trying to make their lives easier? The article certainly complains about West End theatre's "deference to those of sensitive disposition". The warning about the bell is specifically said to be "crazy": earlier this year the deputy Prime Minister in waiting, Richard Tice, said (in remarks which he later withdrew and apologised for) that allowing children to wear ear-protectors at school was "insane" and that the supposed over-diagnoses of special educational needs was "mad" and "an insane situation". The Tosca story carries a quote from "Free Speech Union founder" Lord Young. This is our old friend Toby Young who complained in 2018 that the word "inclusion" was a “ghastly, politically correct word” that implied “wheelchair ramps, the complete works of Alice Walker in the school library (though no Mark Twain) and a Special Educational Needs Department that can cope with everything from dyslexia to Münchausen syndrome by proxy.” 

So: is the point here that people with so-called medical conditions make a very great fuss about stairs and flashing lights and loud noises, and that the British way is to just stiffen your lips and suck it up? 

I also briefly speculated that the obsession with content warnings derived from the belief that everything not forbidden should be compulsory and anything that is not compulsory ought to be forbidden. The ITV guidance notes seem to acknowledge that Grease is a little bit rude and Love Actually is very rude indeed; and that there is a parental judgement call to be made about when kids are old enough to deal with them. But the conservative right often have a problem with shades of grey. 

As recently as the 1980s, it was the reactionary right, not the politically correct left, who objected to rude words, dirty pictures, and simulated violence. And they didn’t just want to avert their own eyes from it: they didn't want anyone else to look at it either. A content warning saying “Contains graphic depictions of anal rape” might have been a perfectly sensible notice to put by the box office for Romans in Britain: but that would not have satisfied Mrs Mary Whitehouse — she wanted the play closed down, and the producer jailed for a criminal offence. Channel 4 did, indeed, warn viewers that Tony Harrison’s poem contained a lot of very bad words, but the same Mrs Mary Whitehouse was not satisfied with this: she thought that it should not have been transmitted in the first place.

So perhaps the point is that warning us that Tommy Cooper occasionally made mildly racist jokes; and that Life of Brian contains a brief bit of full-frontal nudity, acknowledges the possibility that some people might be okay with nude scenes; and that other people might not be okay with racism. Perhaps the thinking is that violent or sexually explicit operas ought to be banned outright (because no decent person could possibly want to see them) but racist and sexist ones should be shown without comment (because no decent person could possibly object to them). Everything is clean, except a small number of dirty things which should be banned. This would be consistent with a newspaper that portrays and England in which a decent majority is permanently under siege from a destructive mob of Others. (cf Ben Goodacre's joke about the paper's ontological project to divide all substances into the ones which cause cancer and the ones which prevent it.)

But I don't even think that this is really what is going on. 

I think that we are looking at a fairly considered and politically motivated language game. I think that conservatives have been working fairly hard and fairly consistently for a number of years to give the phrase “trigger warning” a negative connotation. (They have successfully done the sane same thing with expressions like "woke", “political correctness” and “cancel culture”.) It's a pretty straight forward technique: invent a category; assert that nearly everything falls into that category; and then start wringing your hands because things in that category are so widespread.

At one time, “trigger” had a fairly clear meaning. (So, I think, did “woke”: “political correctness” was only ever a catch-all for things social conservatives disagreed with.) Someone who had undergone a trauma could suffer a severe adverse reaction to something which reminded him of the original traumatic event. It was, therefore, a good idea to warn people in advance if a dramatic work is going to feature gunshots, for example, or references to rape or child abuse. 

So: the first move is to establish that "trigger warnings", in this primary sense, are Bad Things. Gerald’s fallacy will come in handy: since it would obviously be silly to issue a trigger warning for Dumbo in case someone in the audience had once collided with a flying elephant; it follows that it would be silly to mention in advance that Prima Facie contains a very detailed description of a serious sexual assault. 

I think that this is what lies behind the use of the word "woke" in this context. The word is not being used in the original sense of "aware of structural prejudice", nor even as a pejorative term for "left wing". I think it is pretty clearly being used to mean "weak" or even "effeminate". It will be remembered that when the people of Bristol started to say that the city’s involvement in the slave trade was nothing to be very proud of, the most common response among the Daily Mail’s commentariat was the single word “pathetic”. 

Soldiers coming back from the Second World War weren’t given trigger-warnings for their PTSD, after all: they were expected to suck it up. Soldiers suffering from PTSD in the First World War were put up against a wall and shot; and it never did them any harm.

Having debunked the word in its original, legitimate sense, widen the usage, so that practically everything is a trigger warning. All movies have BFFC classification; everything on the TV streaming services have parental advisories; nearly all the London theatre websites publish information about the content of their shows. But if you say so often enough, all these innocuous bits of text can be regarded as "Trigger Warnings"--and therefore Very Bad Things. 

Now we have established that practically everything is a trigger warning, we can move on to the final stage: bombard the world with essays asking why-oh-why trigger warnings are suddenly everywhere. You might just as well proclaim that any woman owning a cat is a witch, and then throw your hands up in horror about the witchcraft epidemic. Play your cards right, and even the serious newspapers will start asking where these trigger warnings came from and what they say about modern society and when there is going to be a public enquiry and if there should be a law against it—when in fact literally nothing has happened.

And this has three excellent side-effects:

1: It means you don’t have to make accommodations for people who may literally and reasonably require actual warnings about actual triggers. If it is ludicrous to provide the information that a passion play depicts crucifixion, then it follows that it would be ridiculous to state in advance that a war film contains a graphic depiction of a napalm attack. 

2: It furthers the idea that young people are weak and that society mollycoddles them. But some people genuinely are freaked out by a five minute representation of a man being whipped; or a person being tied to a chair and shot; or of blood, albeit theatrical blood, in any context. Well, they shouldn’t. They should grin and bear it. Ban avocado lattes and bring back national service! 

3: Most importantly, it furthers belief in your conspiracy theory about how the Gnomes of Zurich or the Bavarian Illuminati are secretly controlling western civilisation. If everything is a trigger warning and all trigger warnings are woke, then it is easy to prove from first principles that the Woke Mob—which is to say the Cultural Marxists, which is probably to say the Jews--secretly control everything. 

And that we need a powerful Man of the People to set us free...

One last point. I cannot prove this: but I am pretty sure that I will be and indeed am being proved right. Whatever the Right accuses the Left of doing is the thing the Right are planning to do themselves. If Daily Mail thinks that the Left are being comically over-sensitive about sex in the media, then you can be sure that the Right is planning a puritanical backlash. If the Right say that the Left are attacking free speech in the theatre, then you can be pretty sure that they'll be reopening the Lord Chamberlain's office as soon as they get back into power. Howls about free speech presage book-burnings and state imposed censorship. 

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The Princess Bride

Thought you might want to read this one again. For some reason. 

Arts Diary: The Princess Bride

Arts Diary: Pillion

Arts Diary: Pillion:  Everyman

Arts Diary: Wicked For Good

Arts Diary: Wicked For Good:  Everyman

Arts Diary: Eternity

Arts Diary: Eternity:  Everyman

The Bringer of Dreams

First Contact?

by Hugh Walters

The latest instalment of my occasional series looking back on a series of science fiction novels you almost definitely read if you were at school in the 1970s. 

This volume raises some weightier than usual questions, and I respectfully suggested the long-than-usual essay may be of interest to people who don't remember the Chris Godfrey series.

I: Current Puns

II: The Road Less Travelled

III: Close Encounters of the Third Kind

IV: Life, the Universe, and Everything

V: Who Mourns for Adonis?

VI: The Most Tremendous Tale of All

VII: The Chief End of Man

If you find this kind of thing interesting, please consider supporting my Patreon

My reviews of previous books in the series may be found here.

VII: The Chief End of Man

Previous Section 

What on Earth or Uranus does Hugh Walters think he is doing?

I don’t think the God-talk can be written off as window dressing or plot machinery. You could write a perfectly good story about benevolent aliens without recourse to theology. First Contact? might work better if the Alien was an ambassador from a secular Galactic Federation, as opposed to the emissary of God Almighty. But Walters takes quite a lot of trouble to go through the religious arguments at a pace nine-year-olds will be able to keep up with. I think that the Supreme Being interests him in a way that fast than light tachyon gravity networks really don’t.

Could he be pushing back against Star Trek? The BBC's first run of the original series had come to an end in 1971. Gene Roddenbury’s humanist message was that you should always reject any being with theological pretensions. It is a far, far better thing to die in an atomic war or a plague than to acknowledge that Apollo has some claim over you. Perhaps this is why Chris Godfrey’s American friend makes the reckless decision to nuke the site from orbit? It’s exactly what James T Kirk would have done.

You can see why an Anglican writer of boys’ space-adventures might want to tell the kids that science and religion are not in conflict. But is Walters seeking to inject some spirituality into science — to say that the feelings we feel when we think of Jesus and the Angels could equally well be directed towards Aliens and flying saucers? Or is he trying to drag religion down to science’s level — by saying that all those Bible stories and Norse sagas have perfectly rational explanations?

The great attraction of Von Daniken is that he gives us permission to believe that the Bible is literally true. Ezekiel really did see a wheel in a wheel, way up in the middle of the air. A sweet chariot really did come for to carry Elijah home. But it does this at the cost of removing their specifically religious significance. The chariots of fire are really only very advanced aircraft. Angels' halos are really only space helmets. When Von Daniken asks “Was God an astronaut?” he means “Was God merely an astronaut?”

And that is the problem that Hugh Walters thinks he has solved. Advanced extraterrestrials are by definition closer to God than humans. God is the most advancedist extraterrestrial of all. If the Uranus Alien is literally an emissary of the Supreme Being, then he is as near to being an actual Angel as makes no difference. Moses and Gabriel were under-cover agents of the Supreme Being. So, presumably, was Gautama. It wouldn’t be difficult to fit J.C into the picture: maybe he’s literally the Supreme Being’s son. Or the Supreme Being travelling incognito.

Joyful all ye nations rise, God and Science reconciled.

Rev Beckwith’s God (in the Doctor Who book) is a deist demiurge whose job is to explain the complexity of the universe. Walters sees, correctly, that science has made an explanatory God redundant. In principle, you can understand how the universe works without recourse to a supernatural creator. But he also sees that a purely scientific world-view throws out the teleological star-baby with the explanatory bath-water. His Supreme Being doesn’t tell us how the Universe works, but what it is for: its purpose and objective. Rev Beckwith’s God is a moral force: he’s there to reassure us that the goodies will always beat the baddies in Episode Six. Walters’ Supreme Being is only indirectly moral. He certainly wants humans to be wise and sensible because if they blow themselves up they will stop evolving. But the Supreme Being doesn't specially want us to be good. The objective of evolution is to evolve. Walters' religion is the worship of progress per se. Walters stated several times that he wrote science fiction “to inspire the young people of today to be the scientists and technicians of tomorrow.” And it seems that this is the meaning of life: the whole purpose for which the universe was invented.

If Chris had not met the Alien, might he have decided that space-exploration was pointless and the human race might as well stagnate? After his memory was wiped, did he feel the urge to drop out of UNEXA and go and live in an arts-and-crafts commune? Walters’ has created a truly Anglican Supreme Being. He is the God Who Makes No Difference; the God who enjoins you to carry on doing exactly what you would have been doing in any case.

VI: The Most Tremendous Tale of All

Previous Section

Chariots of the Gods (published in 1968) set out to debunk religion. Primitive Man saw spaceships and aliens and mistook them for angels and deities. Christianity and Judaism are on precisely the same level as a Pacific Island cargo cult.

But not everyone who read or heard about the book took it that way. Von Daniken intended to say that what we thought were divine beings were really only extraterrestrials. But his effect on the popular imagination was to give extra-terrestrial visitors the aura of the divine. UFOs could sit alongside leylines and astrology as part of the smorgasbord spirituality of the Age of Aquarius.

Arthur C Clarke said that any sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic. The corollary is that any fanciful story about magic might turn out to be a perfectly true story about advanced science. And for some people, this is a comforting thought. There might, after all, be a Santa Claus: it’s just that we slightly misunderstood his nature. If God was an Astronaut, then Astronauts may be a kind of god.

2001: A Space Odyssey (published in the same year as Von Daniken) leans heavily into the space-god mythos. Arthur C Clark would, I assume, have regarded “intelligent design” as pure pseudo-science. But the movie uses the idea of paleocontact to salvage some human exceptionalism from the Darwinian wreckage. Humans aren’t just clever monkeys that happened to have evolved in a particular way. They were deliberately taught tool-making by an enigmatic alien visitor. And the visitor had a purpose in mind: it wants humans to find their way to Jupiter so it can force them to evolve again. Natural selection isn't the whole story: there has to be Something Else. The movie, at any rate, gives no hints as to the nature of that Other Thing it just shows us an enigmatic blank slab, onto which we are free to project God or Science or Magic or Whatever The Heck We Like.

You might think that the idea that Aliens gave rise to the idea of Angels — that Moses came up with the idea of YHWH because he didn't know what a spaceship was —would be roundly condemned by theists as blasphemy of the highest order. But it seems that some Christians and even some clergymen just stroked their dog-collars and said “Maybe so.”

“If we ask ‘what has religion got to do with science fiction’, the answer is ‘everything’ 

So wrote one Rev John D Beckwith in a 1972 paperback called The Making of Doctor Who. We have talked about this momentous little publication before: it was the first Whovian reference book ever published; the only source of information on the early years most of us had before Jeremy Bentham started cranking out xeroxes. 

Why on earth was a C of E vicar asked to contribute an essay to a book which was mainly about special effects, Bill Hartnell’s CV and how they filmed the Sea Devils? I think that there is a pretty clear answer to that question. 

The Making of Doctor Who also contained an earnest little essay, presumably by Terrence Dicks, about the “science” in “science fiction”. It explains the TARDIS’s dimensions in terms of flat-landers, cubes and tesseracts; and points out that strange things happen to time when you approach the speed of light. It tells us, wrongly, that people in olden times believed that if you sailed far enough you would fall off the edge of the world: but it makes the much better point that although we know the world is round, we largely feel that it is flat. It blows our mind by telling us about non-Euclidian geometry: if you travel a hundred miles East, a hundred miles South, a hundred miles West and a hundred miles North, you don’t end up back where you started, because the surface of the earth is curved! And if you cut an orange into eight  segments, you end up with “a triangle with a square corner”. (Rather delightfully, my copy of the book has half-century old orange juice stains on the pages!)

I am afraid Dicks wanted us to draw rather anti-scientific conclusions from all this. We shouldn’t laugh at the sailors who thought the world was flat because some of our ideas might be wrong too. If we can be surprised by four-dimensional cubes and the geometry of curved surfaces, then might there not be all sorts of perspectives from which even more surprising things could be true? So, Daleks and sonic-screwdrivers — why not? It is a hand-wave which has turned up often enough in Doctor Who scripts. Bumblebees would be unable to fly if they were fixed winged aircraft, therefore aerodynamics is false, therefore you can believe anything you want to believe about anything.

The essay also introduces young readers to Femi’s paradox. Space is big, right? So “lets be gloomy” and assume that only one star in a hundred has a planet going round it and only one planet in a hundred as life on it and only one life-form in a hundred is intelligent and only one intelligent life form in a hundred has space ships….then (what with space being so big) that’s still a thousand space-going civilisations in Our-Galaxy-Alone.

So where the hell are they?

Dicks has two theories.

1: Those thousand space faring civilisations have got a hundred thousand million stars to check up on (in Our-Galaxy-Alone). And it takes an awfully long time to travel between them. (Did I mention that space was big?) So doubtless they’ll get around to visiting Earth in the next thousand years.

2: Maybe they have visited us in the past, but we didn’t spot them, because we weren’t “scientific enough”.

As evidence, Dicks points, not to the Pyramids or the Nascar lines, but to a book he calls The Holy Bible (in italics). He quotes the passage about the Four Living Creatures of Ezekiel. Aliens, obviously. He could also have pointed to the “wheel in the wheel” which “went up on their four sides and turned not when they went.” No less a person than Eugene H Peterson thinks that sounds a lot like a gyroscope.

And surely this is why they found a Vicar to say some nice things about Doctor Who on the final pages of the book? We have just, pretty blasphemously, claimed that one of the people who wrote the actual Bible — one of the people who, according to Christians, foretold the coming of Jesus — was an ignorant savage who couldn’t tell a four-headed ET from a Seraphim.

So here is the Reverend Beckwith to provide some balance.

Human beings have always looked up at the sky and made up stories, right? So Greek and Roman myths about the sun and the moon are in a very real sense a kind of olden days science fiction. And scientists and science fiction writers wonder what the universe is like, don’t they? Which is in a very real sense the same thing as the people of the Old Testament “looking for god in the heavens”. And get this — Christians think that Time and Space was made by God! So exploring Time and Space is in a very real sense the same as learning about God, isn’t it? And you know who else talked about Time and Space? Jesus! He told his followers that “God can be found and seen in everything around them” and also that “it is no good looking for God way out in space if we don’t recognise him in our familiar surroundings.” (Er…Citation needed.) Space exploration is a Good Thing, because it helps us understand that the Universe “can only have been planned by something greater than Man himself.” If we discover non-human sentient beings in Space, then God made them as well. The Bible totally says there are angels, who are certainly non-human and certainly sentient. So you could say that they are in a very real sense, “the first spacemen”. “Some people” even think the idea of angels came from alien visitations. And Doctor Who fights bad guys, which “proves that there is one basic Truth in God’s creations, and this is that the most valuable and worthwhile thing is goodness”. That is, in a very real sense, the point of Christianity, that good things are good and bad things are bad and good will win out in the end. We will now sing hymn number 425, All Things Bright and Beautiful…

Dicks’ essay was entitled “Could It All Be True?” But perhaps “It” doesn’t just refer to Zarbi and Silurians and boxes that are bigger on the inside than the outside, but the burning bush and the manna from heaven and the star of Bethlehem as well? The transition from Dicks talking about Ezekiel on page 108 and the Rev. saying that science fiction and Christianity were basically the same thing on page 109 doesn’t amount to a coherent argument: but it planted the idea in my head. The answer to both questions might very well be “Yes”. It evoked a mental mood in which watching Doctor Who on Saturday and going to Sunday School on Sunday were not incompatible and that reading Chris Godfrey stories and reading Every Boys Book of Bible Stories were not contradictory. I think that for the next decade (from the age of about nine to the age of about nineteen) I pretty much took it for granted that Kubrick’s "Dawn of Man" was more or less the literal truth; and that that literal truth was more or less what the book of Genesis “really meant”.

As has been said before: it was not a very healthy state of mind to be in. I was one of the Brainy People who the Man in the Street looked down on; but I was also one of the enlightened modern scientists, free from the arrogance of the pharisaical Victorians. I could listen to the preacher preaching and say “Aha; he doesn’t know he is really talking about aliens”, but I could read a science fiction writer talking about aliens and say “Aha, but the writer doesn’t know he is really talking about God.”

In 1963, the Rev JAT Robinson famously conceded that science had proven that God did not exist, but that it was okay to carry on worshipping a non-existent being because “God” really meant “whatever is most true and most important.” When you say that “God is love” you really mean that love is the most really, really, real thing that there is and you are definitely in favour of it" Robinson’s book was entitled Honest to God. Rev Beckwith’s essay was rather pointedly entitled “Honest to Doctor Who”.

Next Section.

V: Who Mourns for Adonis?

Previous Section 

If this were an adult science fiction novel — and I fully grok that it is not — I think we would expect it to develop in one of the following directions.

A: The Aliens are monstrous, with horrifying personal habits and weird Lovecraftian names. The astronauts assume they are evil: but it turns out that Whiskers is right and they are super-evolved space Christs.

B: The Aliens are beautiful and perfectly good: so much so that they regard humans as a blight on the Universe and intend to wipe us out.

C: The Aliens appear to be beautiful and perfectly good, But in fact they are so advanced that they regard humans as moderately interesting bacteria, and their long term plan involves turning us into perfume and baking the remains into pies.

D: The Aliens really are good and beautiful. But they have no concept of ethics, no moral code, and positively deny the existence of God, leaving everything theologically confused.

But this is a kids' book: and within a few pages of their encounter, the Alien confirms that all Whiskers speculations are true. Life really exists on millions of planets. There really is a quality called “development” and older worlds have more of it and younger worlds don’t have so much. And development really does have an end-point and a destination. 

“At the apex of all this, somewhere, is what we can call the Supreme Intelligence, directing and guiding your World, my World, and countless others too.”

“That—that’s God!” gasped Colin.

“Then there is a Deity?” Chris burst out.

But the Supreme Intelligence is not a Creator or a Designer, although it is indirectly influencing and guiding evolution. The Ultimate Question which he can answer is not "how?" but "why?"

“All are evolving towards the Ultimate: towards the Supreme Intelligence. Otherwise, why should Life evolve at all?”

Why should life evolve at all?

Back on their human's spaceship, Walters introduces us to what might be called Chris’s Wager: "God exists because I would like God to exist." Or, less cynically “It is desirable that there should be a God; therefore I might as will proceed as if there is one.” (Socrates, in fairness, said very much the same thing.) 

“The scheme of things as outlined by the Alien was so attractive and exciting, made life so worthwhile and logical, that if it wasn’t true Chris didn’t want to know. If life was just a chance development amid universal chaos, it seemed a waste. If it had no purpose or objective then all the highest incentives to progress were just self-deception. How flat everything would now seem if all that [the Alien] had said were untrue.“

But wasn’t Chris already a pious church-goer before he encountered the Alien? What new element does rebranding God as the Supreme Intelligence add to his life?

The Alien has one more tbombshell to drop. This is not the first time his race has visited our solar system:

“We have sent our emissaries to live among you. They have been as you are and have lived as you do. Of course your people did not realise that we were from another world. Usually they thought we were the prophets and teachers of your own world.”

Tony immediately connects this with UFO reports, and theorises that “the ancients” might have mistaken aliens for divine beings. He goes so far as to say that there are passages in the Bible which might refer to spaceships.

When asked to explain human religious beliefs to the Alien, Chris admits that among “civilised” people, theism is in decline. He does not say that the better we have understood the Universe, the less we have relied on God for explanations. He doesn’t say that we stopped believing in Adam and Eve once we understood natural selection; or that once we knew about microbes and viruses, we stopped attributing sickness to the devil. He looks at it in terms of a cosmic hierarchy of Greatness. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, humans rejected God because they believed that humans now knew everything and would soon be all-powerful. We're invited to look at Victorian scepticism about God in the same light as the Man in the Street's scepticism about extraterrestrial life: a hubristic belief that Man Is Tops.

“As we thought we were wresting Nature’s secrets away from her, so belief in God began to crumble. Given time, man could know everything and would be all-powerful.”

But it is again the Brainy Chaps who have seen the fallacy of this:

“For every new discovery that was made, complete understanding seemed to have become further away. Gradually, I think we are losing the arrogance that made us see Man as the be-all and end-all of creation.”

Atheism is the arrogant believe that the human mind is supreme; theism, the humble acknowledgement that it is not. Chris's story is a variation of the one in the Bible. Pride is the root of every sin. Man tastes the fruit of the tree of knowledge and believes that he can become as gods, knowing good from evil.

Next Section

IV: Life, the Universe and Everything

Previous Section

On page 89 of the book old “Whiskers”, the comic relief ex-Battle of Britain duffer tells Lord Benson, out of the blue “I think there must be a God.”

Benson does not reply “Well, of course you do, you’re British, dammit.”

Neither does he reply “Since we have attended Holy Communion together, I rather took that for granted.”

On the contrary, Benson is rather embarrassed. He thinks that religion is “something which one didn’t talk about” — despite having literally knelt down and prayed out loud with the teenage Chris in the first volume. One wonders who all those silent prayers that he keeps uttering have been directed at?

Whiskers explains his thinking. 

“...the universe is older and more complicated than the human mind can conceive. It’s older than we can imagine even if we accept the big bang theory of its creation….” 

and so on at some length. In summary, his argument goes like this:

1: The Universe is big.
2: The Universe is old.
3: The Universe is complex.
4: The Universe is ordered.
5: Humans do not understand the Universe.
6: Therefore Humans are not the greatest thing in the Universe
7: Therefore something greater than Humans must exist.

I am not sure he actually needed to bother with stages 1-6. If there is extraterrestrial life, then it must by definition be either a: greater than humans b: less great than humans or c: about equal to humans. And if there are a huge number of extraterrestrial life forms, then it is highly probable that at least one of them must be our superior. The proposition is actually “If we are not the only thing in the universe, then we are almost certainly not the greatest thing in it.”

But is there any extraterrestrial life at all? Walters explains that someone called “the man in the street”, relying on something called “common sense” is entirely skeptical about it.

“If these brainy chaps wanted to believe that, then let them. Mr Ordinary Man knew better. He felt in his bones that he was ‘the tops’. How could there be a higher form of life, he asked himself proudly as he looked around at his pubs and bingo halls, his motor cars and tinned foods, his palaces and slums.”

The Man in the Street does not point to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony or King Lear as proof of man’s superiority: this is the voice of grammar school educated British Interplanetary Society member sneering at the plebs who only made it to Secondary Modern. But It’s a decent enough device for getting readers on side. Obviously, we all want to be on the side of the Brainy Chaps.

We aren’t told what the man-in-the-street thinks about religion: but we get a brief insight into what Brainy Chaps think. Benson, it turns out, is strictly agnostic. He thinks that the universe has three qualities

1: Complexity
2: Beauty
3: Infinite wonder.

It isn’t clear if he thinks that complexity is intrinsically beautiful, or if there could have been a universe was beautiful and simple, or one which was complicated but ugly. It also isn’t clear if “wonder”, “complexity” and “beauty” are intrinsic properties that the universe has, or merely descriptions of human beings reaction to it. But he does think that they might imply that there is a “thing” that “lies behind” the universe.

He does not think that this Thing, if it exists, would have explanatory power. He does not say that the universe is so complicated, beautiful and wonderful that some Thing even more complicated, beautiful and wonderful must have had a hand in the design of it. But if such a Thing exists, we can reasonably ask what the Universe is for. The existence of the Thing implies that the universe has a “meaning” and that there is a “direction in which it is moving.”

It is trivially true that if Man is not the greatest thing in the universe, then something greater than Man must exist. And if there are many things in the Universe and many degrees of greatness, one Thing must necessarily be the greatest of all. But it is by no means the case that "the greatest thing which happens to exist" is also the "greatest thing which could possibly exist". But we seem to have agreed that "the greatest thing which happens to exist" can reasonably be given the name "God". 

Whiskers reasoning goes beyond Benson’s

1: A race with more complicated machines and greater scientific understanding can be said to be more advanced than one without those things.
2: An older race must have been developing longer than a younger race.
3: An older race must have been evolving for longer than a younger race — indeed, it must be "more evolved".
4: Advancement, development and evolution all imply an increase in greatness.
5: The thing with the most greatness is called God.
6: Therefore older races must be closer to God than younger ones.
7: God is by definition good.
8: Therefore older races must necessarily be more good than younger ones, and our heroes have nothing to fear from the aliens.

Whiskers is, in fact, conflating “greatness” with “goodness”: he is assuming that “more advanced” is synonymous with “better”. We could label this Taylor’s Fallacy: “Somewhere in the universe there has to be something better than man”.

Sir Billy, who has replaced Sir George as head of UNEXA, points out that evolution is not a matter of linear improvement: “many other things” apart from the human mind has evolved. But Whiskers refutes this — there have been “set backs and side tracks” but the “trend” has always been towards greater intelligence. The arc of evolution is long, but it bends towards Prof Albert Einstein. 

This is indeed the view of evolution promulgated in 1970s school text books which tended to show chimpanzees turning into stockbrokers and codfish turning into triceratops as automatically as kittens turn into pussy cats and tadpoles turn into frogs. A scientific theory about change and adaptation has morphed into a narrative about inevitable improvement. This provided Creationists with a convenient stick with which to beat Charles Darwin: since the "inevitable improvement" theory was obviously silly, the whole idea of evolution was obviously fake news.

“What you are saying,” Lord Benson interposed “is that because [the Alien] must come from an older race, it must necessarily be from a more advanced and intelligent race. That evolution is always towards a higher plane, is always an advance.”

“Something like that.” Whiskers agreed…”Evolution has a definite direction and objective” he declared firmly. “I believe it is towards God himself.”

And later

“So what you are saying is that because this Alien comes from a far more technically advanced civilisation than ours, from a race that must have been evolving far longer than ours, they must be nearer and more like God than we are?” Lord Benson enquired.

So: we have a hypothesis. Because the Alien is technologically superior to humans, it must necessarily be morally superior to humans as well. 

And back on the surface of Planetty McPlanettface, we see the hypothesis being tested.

 

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III: Close Encounters of the Third Kind

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The boffins have detected peculiar signals coming from...Planetty MacPlanetFace. No-one can listen to the signals for very long without getting a blinding migraine. Since it is unlikely that something so mindbogglingly annoying could have evolved purely by chance, the boffins conclude that Someone must be trying very hard to get our attention. So not one but two space ships are sent to investigate.

The previous volume, Nearly Neptune, ended on a small cliffhanger: Chris Godfrey was offered the job of deputy director of UNEXA on condition he gave up being an astronaut. We have already been told that astronauts retire at the age of forty, and it is very hard to see how he can be less than thirty-seven at this point. First Contact? begins in media res with the mission already well under way. It turns out that Chris is in command for one last trip. The American One, the Russian One, and the Working Class One from the previous volumes are all present and correct, and the empty spaces are filled by The Welsh One, the Scots One, the Bald One and the Not-Bald One. They really aren’t characterised beyond this. Mervyn Williams (really) has a poetic soul. During a space walk he intones “Beautiful it is, like a great black mantle with diamonds sewn all over it”. This is very much the kind of book in which people "intone" things. They also "splutter" them, "gasp" them and "murmur" them. But they hardly ever just "say" them.

A charming sense of amateurism pervades the proceedings. No-one seems to have given a moment’s consideration to what Chris will actually do if he encounters Aliens. You might think some diplomats, heads of state, anthropologists and even philosophers would be on hand to advise him, but everyone is fine with the chaps on the rocket-ship just winging it.

The unstated assumption seems to be that astronauts are a special class of human being, and that only someone who is good at “being an astronaut” can possibly be sent into space. It’s a little like the idea that there is a quality called “the right stuff” — quite distinct from aptitude — and it is that which makes someone a great test-pilot. Certainly our heroes have technical know-how — we are told that the ship has banks of hard to understand controls — but plot points always turn on things which the boffins on Earth and Tony (the Working Class one) on the space ship have cobbled together. When the strange sounds being emitted by Planetty McPlanetface render communication between the two ships impossible, Tony improvises a morse code machine from bits and pieces on the ships. The Boffs on earth borrow one from a museum. Sir George Benson (the outgoing director) works out how the signals work by playing them to himself in his back garden, moving his wheel chair to various distances to calculate the range of the migraine effect. He has to go down the road to the electrical shop to buy an extension cable!

These kinds of details make it easy for us to put ourselves in the heroes' place, and imagine that we ourselves are out there enjoying all the diamonds and black velvet. During the communication crisis, Tony decides that the best thing to do is make a space-walk to the other ship and explain the problem to them face-to-face; and Walters takes us slowly through him putting on the space suit, stepping out of the air-lock, navigating his way through empty space... It’s not the only way of writing for kids, but it works. It’s very much the technique which makes Enid Blyton and JK Rowling so compelling for anyone under the age of eleven and so unbearable for anyone older. 

So: the boys land on Planetty McPlanetface. There really is an Alien space craft there — all knobbly and un-aerodynamic and without a proper door. Communications are established and the Alien invites a delegation aboard for a face-to-face meeting.

The ship turns out to come from another solar system, where there is no death, no gravity, and a different shaped gear-stick on the Mini Metro. It doesn’t need doors because Aliens have mastered the art of walking through walls. It travels faster than the speed of light along concentrated gravity beams that criss-cross the galaxy. The Alien itself is aloof, but friendly and humanoid and good looking. The Not-Bald-One thinks he looks like an archangel, although the Bald-One points out the Lucifer was a fallen angel.

Chris takes the Alien at its word. But Morey (the American one) thinks Chris has trusted the angelic extraterrestrial far too easily and probably been mind-controlled. When Chris and the others do not return from their second sojourn on the vessel, he decides that the most sensible course of action would be to blow up the Alien Spaceship and return home. He plans to take control of one of the Earth ships and go kamikaze. Nothing we know about Morey has given us any reason to think that he would be this reckless. I was kind of waiting for the revelation that he was the one who had been hypnotised.

The Alien of course, knows what is happening immediately. He takes control of the suicide ship and it bounces harmlessly off his force-field. But far from sending Morey to stand outside the headmaster’s office, the Alien pats him on the head and tells him that he has been a very brave boy. After all, he truthfully thought the Alien was evil, and was courageously prepared to lay down his life to protect the human race. But clearly, humans are not yet ready to join the wider galactic community, so everyone is sent back to earth with a jolly good mind-wipe. The amnesiac astronauts tell the boffins that although they believe they saw an Alien spaceship, by the time they landed, it had disappeared; so they turned around and came straight home.

The story ends on another dot-dot-dot moment: George Benson realises that they were actually on the planet for several days and something is being concealed.

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II: The Road Less Travelled

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Science fiction is about opening doors and looking at things from new angles. I remember the first line of 2001: A Space Odyssey — “behind every human being there stands three ghosts; that is the ratio in which the dead outnumber the living” — far better than I remember the nonsense about monoliths and mad computers. Many young minds were blown by Phillip K Dick or the Matrix long before they knew that grown-up philosophers worried about the mind/body problem. Even a silly schoolboy writer like Edgar Rice Burroughs could be life-changing; not because his science is good — his science is non-existent — but because he gives you permission to imagine what the world would look like from a completely different perspective.

Sometimes you return to a place, or person or a book you knew a long time ago and say: “Oh: that’s where I learned that particular idea. I thought that it was just what I always believed.”

Or, of course “That’s the moment at which I took the wrong turning.”

First Contact?  is the twelfth book in the children’s science fiction saga which began with Blast Off At Woomera. The books contain a little bit of engineering, a little bit of popular astronomy, a lot of narrow escapes and a light seasoning of muscular Christianity. But they have thus far been largely devoid of anything that could be called “ideas”.

But First Contact? contains the biggest possible idea. The book literally reveals the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything. And it isn’t a joke or a punch-line. I am pretty sure that Hugh Walters believed it, and wanted his readers to believe it. And for a decade, at least, from the age of eight to the age of eighteen, I did believe it. I had completely forgotten the source: but I took it for granted.

It’s Holy Blood and Holy Grail for infants. 

It’s Olaf Stapleton for Year 4. 

It’s complete codswallop.

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