I DID enjoy Jerry Springer: The Opera on BBC2 at the weekend. Perhaps it was the notion that so many had complained about this programme that made it appealing.

Watching this reviled musical felt like being in on the biggest, rudest snigger of the moment. Sometimes there is nothing like a big, rude snigger to lift the spirits.

For me, this musical satire on the tacky programme fronted by Jerry Springer scored a double hit by poking ruthless fun at low and high culture. It mocked the tawdry confessional TV age in which we live, while also having a few sharp jabs at high culture, in the shape of opera.

Jerry Springer: The Opera was also extremely funny, a witty and inspired piece of work. Yes, there were an astonishing number of profanities. I'm not a fan of swearing as such, but here the bad language was a form of punctuation that gave the show its rhythm and satirical spring.

To see an opera singer belting out an aria studded with expletives struck me as hugely funny.

Others had a different reaction to Saturday's BBC2 production. Our theatre critic Charles Hutchinson, who sits opposite me here in Walmgate, was not won over and will, no doubt, be delivering his verdict when a touring production visits the Grand Opera House in late November.

The writers of this show, Stewart Lee and Richard Thomas, clearly set out to be provocative, both with the language and the blasphemy. It was the supposed insults to Christianity that caused the biggest stir before BBC2 screened a filmed version of the hit West End musical.

In the run-up to the broadcast, a combination of certain shin-kicking newspapers and evangelical pressure groups ensured that a late-night opera - of all the unlikely things - caused the biggest publicity stir imaginable, and was watched by 1.8 million viewers.

There were 47,000 complaints before the broadcast and Christian demonstrators massed outside Broadcasting House, burning their licence fees. Two things, it strikes me, were missing from these angry displays. One: the protesters hadn't seen what they were protesting about, as is so often the case.

Two: there was no context. So the noisy complaints, for example, about Christ being seen wearing a nappy were wide of the mark. Instead, the actor who played Christ wore a nappy while playing someone else earlier on in the play.

Oh, let's try for a third: the Christian protesters, people supposedly of a loving faith, were behaving like the most demented bigots who wanted to stamp on all freedom of expression.

Whatever happened to all that stuff about turning the other cheek?

All of which was odd because, in many ways, it could be argued that Jerry Springer: The Opera had a moral direction; it knew right from wrong, and had scabby good fun exploring the territory, while also dwelling on sin and redemption.

The scale of the fuss seemed out of proportion to its target, and while many people may have been offended by this musical, they didn't have to watch. They certainly couldn't have stumbled on the show, because the warnings were piled up like barbed wire on top of a wall.

As to whether or not the BBC should have shown this production, of course it should. Do we really want the carpers and complainers, of whatever creed, to get programmes banned? Besides, the BBC spends my licence money on all sorts of offensive nonsense. I'd gladly tick a box which read: Jeremy Clarkson will get no portion of my licence fee. But that's not the way it works.

Incidentally, much of the complaining was led by the Sun newspaper, that well-known guardian of the nation's morals.

If modern life has become coarser, as many people believe, then Rupert Murdoch's tabloid, along with his satellite TV stations, has been stuck in there with the sandpaper, wearing away at the old ways and institutions with glee and gusto.

Well done to the BBC on this occasion for not caving in.

Updated: 10:19 Thursday, January 13, 2005