Kerre Woodham: Unholy row a TV ratings blessing

Thank heavens that's over. The Bloody Mary episode of South Park has been and gone, and C4 has enjoyed the highest ratings it's experienced in its young life.

It's unlikely it will ever achieve the likes of those again. I hope the sales team added a zero to the billing schedule - got to make hay while the sun shines.

Programmes like South Park are for a select audience - those that enjoy scatalogical humour and puerile jokes. It's comedy that bludgeons sacred cows with heavy humour, as opposed to skewering the cows with rapier wit. There's a place for that sort of comedy - nothing like a bodily function joke to reduce a complex issue down to its most fundamental level - but it's not for me. Or indeed for much of New Zealand, given the usual ratings for South Park. But the media furore over this particular episode ensured this off-beat, off-mainstream television programme received far more attention than it deserved.

That's the thing about offended sensibilities. People who want to promote their product and garner the sort of column inches publicists can only dream of, need only hint that a particular cross-section of the public is going to be outraged by their particular creative enterprise, be it a television programme like this one, an artwork like Virgin in a Condom, a film like Life of Brian, a book like The Satanic Verses, for it to be an instant success.

Send out a press release with the words controversial and religious dotted liberally throughout and you're guaranteed at least five minutes of fame - 10 if it's a slow news week.

To be fair to the creators of South Park, this particular programme was more about people's desire to offload responsibility for their own demons by looking for miracles than it was about beating up the Catholic Church. Still, the anarchic makers of the show wouldn't have been at all concerned at the offence they knew they would undoubtedly cause Catholics. They've offended everyone over the years.

In fact, I believe they even depicted Muhammad on the show, way back when the Danish cartoons were still lead in the pencils of the cartoonists. Depicting the Virgin Mary in such a crude fashion would no doubt have been seen by the South Park team as equal opportunity offending. And to be fair to the Catholic faithful, they had to display some polite and well-ordered outrage - otherwise in the wake of the hysteria over the Danish cartoons, it would have appeared as though they didn't take their religion as seriously as Muslims took theirs.

It's over now, and let's hope the offended realise that by making their offence public, they're simply playing into the hands of those who are looking to score cheap points.

- HERALD ON SUNDAY