Frances Grant: Watch Popetown and weep

Since the Catholic Church laid off burning heretics and adopted a gentler approach to disagreeing parties, it has had less interesting discipline problems.

The Inquisition had its downside, of course, in terms of being a public relations blunder of historical proportions, but you couldn't fault the quality of the opposition.

Galileo, for example, had an excellent point about the Earth circling the sun and not, as the church believed so firmly, vice versa, whereas Madonna Ciccone, a late 20th-century thorn in the Vatican's side, only had a silly music video on MTV and a desire to make rosary beads a fashion accessory.

The threat of a good stake burning might have brought the pop diva back into the fold and saved us the tedium of her conversion to the Kabbalah (we'd like to see her turn that into an erotic video with S&M undertones but we'll be waiting a long time, no doubt, to see the pop diva mock her own celebrity spirituality).

A sterner reaction from the church against detractors would have put paid to another tiresome phenomenon: the controversial French-Canadian movie about Jesus. And it certainly would have saved us the most overrated potboiler of recent times, The Da Vinci Code.

That's the problem with a mature, tolerant and forgiving religion: Dan Brown deserved the severest discipline for inflicting on the world all that turgid and repetitively plotted nonsense about Opus Dei, Mary Magdalene and the Knights Templar. He should have been castigated for the disruption caused to queues at the Louvre alone.

It is strange that a church which has been accused of being allergic to humour (read or seen The Name of the Rose anyone?) should now be slammed for protesting about what must be the most laugh-free bit of animated comedy ever to blight the box: Popetown.

Watch the C4 show and weep in frustration and despair. How could a Brit team which features the likes of Mackenzie Crook and Morwenna Banks get it so wrong?

Anyone who caught a skerrick of the extensive and devoted media coverage of the death of Pope John Paul II, with its cardinals, conclaves, might and majesty, would know the Vatican and its goings-on should be rich satirical pickings.

Surely a church battling an epidemic of sex abuse scandals and swimming desperately against the modern moral tide of equality for women, safe sex and sensible birth control should offer a black comedy feast.

But no, all Popetown has to offer is an infantile Pope throwing his toys out of the cot; a cleric salivating over exotic animals, a few cardinals floating around on their poolchairs and - here they really let down us former convent girls - the sorriest spoof of an Irish nun ever invented.

Talk about missed chances. Forget the pogosticks, this is a church which has elected a German person, aka the Rottweiler, as its new leader. This is an outfit which lets its paramount chief ride around to gigs in something resembling a souped-up golf cart. Vatican City is a place where no sane person would dare get in the moshpit with the nuns at one of those big showcase Masses.

No, all Popetown seems to have to offer is obvious plots about the Vatican cosying up to a dodgy regime to fill its coffers and a few scenes taking puerility to a low not even Beavis and Butthead could have managed.

The real shame of Popetown is abuse done to a fine television genre that has taken inventive irreverence to new levels. The animated comedy has brought us such tasty cultural skewerings as The Simpsons and Southpark, and our own jaw-droppingly satirical Bro'Town.

Bless the Popetown creators, Father, for they have sinned.