Desert Island Discs snub to the Bible... on Good Friday
THE BBC has sparked uproar by choosing to broadcast an episode of Desert Island Discs during Easter which contains a snub to the Bible.
Christians are angry that the corporation chose to broadcast the episode, featuring Professor Alice Roberts, first on Palm Sunday and then in a repeat on Good Friday.
In the episode, Professor Roberts, in common with every other castaway to appear on the show, is told she can take a book of her choice to the island along with a copy of the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare.
But Professor Roberts, who became estranged from her own parents in 2018 after she was chosen to become president of Humanists UK in January 2019, refused the Bible. She told presenter Lauren Laverne: ‘Well, I’m not having the Bible because I’m a humanist.’ Ms Laverne replied: ‘Of course you don’t need to take the Bible if you don’t want to.’
Professor Roberts, 50, who presents the BBC’s Digging For Britain programme, then picked George Eliot’s Middlemarch as her book of choice. She said: ‘I love it because it is about ordinary people, and it is about the small choices that we make in our lives which are really important.’
Ex-Home Office minister Ann Widdecombe, who is a convert to Catholicism, said the decision to broadcast the episode over Easter was proof the BBC didn’t consider the feelings of Christians.
She said: ‘I think it’s extremely tactless. The BBC wouldn’t have thought about the scheduling at all because they never do think about Christians. They’d have thought about it if it was anything specific to another faith.’
Monsignor Michael Nazir-Ali, a Catholic priest and former Anglican Bishop of Rochester, defended Professor Roberts’ right to refuse a copy of the Bible but also questioned the BBC’s decision to broadcast the episode over Easter.
He said: ‘The BBC has a responsibility for the whole nation and there are still a very large number of Christians in this nation.
‘Even on the Palm Sunday, which is the beginning of Holy Week, there should have been sensitivity.’ In the episode, Professor Roberts spoke about how she became estranged from her parents because of her beliefs, and declined to go to her mother’s funeral last year.
A BBC spokesman said: ‘People of all faiths are welcome on Desert Island Discs at any time of the year and nothing offensive was said by our castaway who declined to take the Bible – there is no obligation for castaways to take any item with them to their imagined island, which, to be clear, doesn’t actually exist.’