Omigod omigod omigod Tim Minchin wrote a song about Jesus and it has jokes in it – jokes about Jesus! Would you believe it? He wrote it because some tv people asked him to for their pre-Christmas show.

It was the worst possible time to be writing a new song – I’ve been overworked and ill, was on tour, and was really feeling the stress. But I wasn’t going to say no… it’s Jonathan Ross!

…

It’s certainly not very contentious, but even so, compliance people and producers and lawyers all checked my lyrics long before the cameras rolled. As always with these bespoke writing jobs, I was really stressed for about 3 days, and almost chucked it in the bin 5 times, and freaked out that it wasn’t funny and all that boring shit that people like me go through when we’re lucky enough to have with a big audience with high expectations.

…

I did my song and everyone laughed and Tom said it was great and when it was done I ran off set onto the back of a waiting motorbike, got from South Bank to the Hammersmith Apollo in 13 minutes, walked into the building, straight on to stage to sing White Wine in the Sun with Professor Brian Cox. Rock n roll.

And after all that, someone sent it to ITV’s boss of tv Peter Fincham, who axed it.

He did this because he’s scared of the ranty, shit-stirring, right-wing press, and of the small minority of Brits who believe they have a right to go through life protected from anything that challenges them in any way.

And Tim Minchin wrote the blog post about it, and the BBC reported that Minchin had written a blog post about it. No really. It did. The headline is “Tim Minchin fumes over song cut from Jonathan Ross show” and then it summarizes his blog post. Just as I am, now, but I’m not the BBC!

And the Telegraph did a sniffy censorious shock-horror piece.

A song by comedian Tim Minchin that describes Jesus Christ as a “zombie” and compares the Virgin Mary to a “lizard” has been cut from Jonathan Ross’ Christmas broadcast by ITV executives for fear of offending Christians.

That’s just the subhead. It goes on to quote chunks of the song, so that the readers will understand exactly what was so fraffly shocking.

Minchin asked the Telegraph reporter, Matthew Holehouse, some very cogent questions on Twitter, which was amusing. (And Holehouse answered, also amusing, though in a different way.)

Another Streisand effect, pretty much. Uh oh, drop that blasphemous song. Blasphemous song gets reported and quoted all over the place. GOVERN YOURSELF ACCORDINGLY.