CAITLIN MORAN
How bad have the past five years been? Obviously there have been a couple of wars, and Jim Davidson’s £4 million contract with the BBC won’t have helped. But 2.4 million? That’s 1,329 people a day. One person every minute. Little wonder the Pope won’t endorse contraception — the only way out of that kind of fall-off in subscription is to breed, and fast. I’m sure that if the Radio Times were losing readers at a similar rate, BBC Worldwide would ban rubber johnnies, too.
A lot of it must be down to how little it takes to make us question the existence of God these days. A hundred years ago a man could go through the entire First World War — dead babies on pikes and all — and then maybe once, when he was very drunk, 50 years later, say “I did, on one occasion, wonder if there was a God up there, after all.”
Nowadays, however, it only takes the fat, plucky one being knocked out of Pop Idol for six of us to fling ourselves on the floor screaming: “That’s it! There can’t be a God! He is dead to me!” I have personally felt God to be dead on each of the following occasions in the past six months: missing a birth visualisation class because I couldn’t find a parking space in Swiss Cottage, Tesco online substituting my butternut squash for a marrow, two cashpoint rejections — one with cab waiting — and the afternoon where, due to a long and frankly unfeasible sequence of events, my two-year-old daughter did a poo in front of an audience who’d gathered to hear a lecture about African mammals in a tent at London Zoo.
Conversely, whenever I experience good fortune, God’s the last person it occurs to me to thank: when I delivered a healthy child after a virtually pain-free labour, I thanked Bupa, and when my dad won £500 on BananaLotto, I put it down to his admirable perseverance in doing BananaLotto. If God had tried to muscle in on either event, it would have been like those toilet attendants who hand you a paper towel and then kind of hang around in an “I’d like a pound” way. There’s no need for a middleman! We were managing perfectly well on our own.
The thing is, through no fault of His own, God’s name has started becoming indelibly associated with bad things. God, as far as we can tell, has done nothing wrong — yet because the only time he gets mentioned these days is: (a) during increasingly febrile debates as to whether he likes gays or not and (b) when sundry dangle-jawed peasants from around the world scream his name before killing someone, a small part of you does go “Ooooh, God. Nutters”.
Of course, God can hardly help having nutty fans. When you’re past your peak — and a 40 per cent drop-off in support suggests God is — what you’re increasingly left with is, well, the hardcore. The freaks. Imagine how terrified you’d be to meet someone who, in this day and age, described themselves primarily as a fan of Kajagoogoo. I kind of feel the same about people who primarily describe themselves as Christians, or Muslims, or Jews. And the sad truth is that having a lot of these people as your fans just isn’t doing God, or Limahl, many favours. If they wanted people to believe in God, or listen to Too Shy, the best thing they could do is shut up about God, or Limahl. But you tend not to find quiet fanatics, and so the PR problem goes on.
Indeed, it’s a mark of how bad God’s current publicity situation is that the only vaguely pleasant thing to have been linked to Him recently was Rowan Williams’s sleevenotes to the Best Of The Incredible String Band box-set, and even then he didn’t actually mention God at any point. There was just a comforting waft of general goodness.
Even in the face of all these reasons to stop believing in God, however — the killer combination of bad PR and us all becoming that fatal bit more logical — God might have been able to hang on in there if it weren’t for www.lawyers4U.co.uk and the Accident Helpline. Before the advent of the “No Win, No Fee”, when things went wrong, the only person you could blame was God — down on your knees, rending your garments, etc — which at least kind of kept you in touch with Him. Since “No Win, No Fee” kicked in, however, you can just blame the local council’s paving department, and get a cheque for £8,000, to boot. Believe in God — or pay off your overdraft and go to Disneyland? It’s a tricky one.