Sunday morning TV is a truly terrifying thing to behold – if you're not subjected to 19 solid hours of Hollyoaks, you're forced to watch religious folk banging on how they can heal people with their hands.
Folk like – ooh, let's pick a name at random here – hatefully smug 1980s one-hit-wonder balladeer Chris De Burgh. Yeah, Lady In Red Chris De Burgh. Chronically unable to pronounce the word 'romance' without sounding like he's getting struck down with a debilitating stroke somewhere in between the first and second syllable Chris De Burgh. Yeah, him. Good job we picked Chris De Burgh as an example, really, because mulleted nobsack Chris De Burgh has only bloody well gone on Sunday morning TV and told the entire world that his hands can perform miracles like Jesus, hasn't he?
We don't know about you, but we're always getting the son of God Jesus Christ Our Lord mixed up with the genuinely harrowing monobrowed middle of the road soft rock tosspot Chris De Burgh. OK, so the limit of our mixed-upness usually involves us watching all the violent bits from The Passion Of The Christ on DVD over and over again in super slow motion while imagining that it's Chris De Burgh getting flogged by Romans instead of Jesus, having his hands nailed to a bit of wood and then being stabbed in the side to make sure he's dead. Quite often we'll mute The Passion Of The Christ and listen to Lady In Red on a loop while we do this.
But that's normal – most people have found themselves doing something like this at one point or another. What's weird is that Chris De Burgh has taken things a step further and claimed that he can actually perform miracles with his own hands. Speaking on BBC One's annoyingly toothless patchwork quilt of a Sunday morning religious magazine programme The Heaven And Earth Show – possibly in between a discussion about how lovely moonbeams are and a package about a vicar that's started to give sermons to earthworms – Chris De Burgh decided to say this. In public. On television:
"I have found myself able to cure people with my hands… I met someone in the West Indies who was not able to walk. I put my hands on him and he was able to get up… I know the tabloids will get excited by this so I try to play it down."
And by 'play it down' Chris De Burgh means 'sue anyone who even mentions that he has magical hands like a fucking wizard's' – according to The Sun, at least. Anyway, if this is true, if Chris De Burgh really is capable of healing people just by touching them, then surely Chris De Burgh should be telling everyone about it. Why isn't Chris De Burgh out on the streets right now taking away the pain that blights millions of people's lives just by touching them?
Well, it might have something to with most people being happier to spend the rest of their lives in crippling agony instead of letting Chris De Burgh rub his smug aristocratic 1980s soft-rock hands all over them even for a second. But who knows, eh?
Read more:
De Burgh In Miraculous Powers Claim – Dotmusic
[story by Stuart Heritage]