mediawatchwatch.org.uk

John Beyer of Mediawatch-UK has an ambition. The smut-campaigner with his finger on the pulse of society aims to get one million signatures by Jan 8, 2008 on the following petition:

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to initiate urgent action to require the Office of Communication (Ofcom), using its regulatory powers, to substantially reduce the portrayal of fictional violence and the use of obscene language on television.

So, how is he doing? Thanks to Chris at Clapham.org, we can keep an eye on the progress of this important document. At the time of writing, there are 1,707.

Flemming Rose reports that Modog artist Lars Vilks has been barred from exhibiting at the Esloev Bennale in south Sweden.

Celilia Lind, a Social Democrat member of the city council, said:

It’s an unnecessary provocation to allow Vilks to join the exhibition…Many people are offended by his art

Another Social Democrat, Kahlid El-Haj, explained that, as a Muslim, he was offended on behalf of the 1 billion Muslims around the world.

But there has been resistance. Art critic Pontus Kyander has called on the judiciary to take action, claiming that the censorship is a violation of the Swedish constituion:

It’s not for local authorities to decide which artists are permitted to exhibit their work. It’s a local berufsverbot. The right to free speech is thoroughly defended in the constitution, and especially artistic freedom has wide limits… As I see it, Esloev city council has violated the constitution, and the case need to be given af hearing in court.

Some Vilks supporters invited the Danish artist Uwe Max Jensen to take his place. Jensen received a copy of one of Vilks’s Motoons, and erased it with a rubber as an act of protest. The resulting blank piece of paper will be displayed in the room where Vilks’s work was supposed to be shown. It is entitled Erase Mohammed.

A Catholic historian has accused the film Elizabeth: The Golden Age of being a “concerted attack on Catholicism” concocted by an unlikely alliance between atheists and apocalyptic Christians.

Professor Franco Cardini believes the film, which stars Cate Blanchett as Elizabeth I, is part of a plot to “secularise and de-Christianise Europe”.

Apparently, Elizabeth is portrayed as “an able politician and courageous sovreign”, while King Philip II of Spain is a “ferocious, fanatical Catholic, swinging his rosary like a weapon and roaming the Escorial Palace like a madman, full of impotent fury,dreaming of subjugating the world to the Catholic faith”. What is more, the defeat of the Spanish Armada is presented as a “shining victory for free thought against the forces of darkness in the form of the Inquisition”.

The National Catholic Register (subscription needed) added to the collective whinge in its review, in which it claimed the film was more damaging to the Catholic church than the Da Vinci Code:

The climax, a weakly staged destruction of the Spanish Armada, is a crescendo of Church-bashing imagery: rosaries floating amid burning flotsam, inverted crucifixes sinking to the bottom of the ocean, the rows of ominous berobed clerics slinking away in defeat.

Sounds like a must-see. Thanks for the heads-up, angry Catholics!