Devil’s Work

Mary Whitehouse must be turning in her grave. Her favourite television company, Channel 4 is to screen a controversial scene cut from Ken Russell's notorious 1971 film The Devils of demented nuns "raping" a statue of Jesus Christ. Being shown publicly for the first time for 31 years, this pleasant episode was thought to have been destroyed after the BBFC raised their hands in horror at the offending incident in Russell's actually rather fantastic and wonderfully camp tale of religious oppression and sexual hysteria in seventeenth-century France. But no, film crusader Mark Kermode cleverly managed to find the sliced scene in a film-storage warehouse and has made it the centre of his programme "Hell on Earth" to be broadcast next Monday on Channel 4. Featuring interviews with key cast and crew, the programme will trace the history of the film that gave new meaning to the term 'controversial' and includes Russell himself describing the banned footage as "one of the most mind-blowing sequences ever censored." Soapboxes ready yourselves, the complaints about this one are never going to stop.