Archbishop's despair at TV soap
The Archbishop of Canterbury has urged Christians to reject the self-seeking lifestyle typified by the hit ITV television series, Footballers' Wives.
In an Easter message, Dr Rowan Williams said the programme portrayed a world in which good qualities like charity and fairness had been swept side.
Writing in Outlook, the diocese's newspaper, he said it represented "different kinds of selfish behaviour."
The makers of the programme told the Observer they agreed with the bishop.
'Shallow world'
Eileen Gallagher of Shed Productions said: "I think he has made a good point. We wanted Footballers' Wives as basically an antidote to all the overblown celebrity we now see in society."
She said researching the programme had revealed a world that was often "shallow and money-obsessed".
Dr Williams has often drawn parallels from popular culture as metaphors for his religious messages and has said he likes The Simpsons.
But he said the characters in Footballers Wives treated each other as rivals for the same space, although God had given space to all.
The challenge at Easter was to examine how we regard foreigners and refugees, he added.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3575861.stm