Here’s an invitation to join hecklerspray as we look at two different takes on a similar subject. Open your textbooks at the page marked ‘witchcraft.’

Firstly, we have the popular 1960s TV sitcom Bewitched (DVD), a long-running ratings hit that’s soon to be updated into a blockbuster movie starring pretty lady Nicole Kidman (DVDs) and professional mirthmaker Will Ferrell (DVDs).

Secondly, we have the the infamous Salem witch trials. Immortalised in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (DVD), this was the wave of public hysteria in 1692 that led to the public hanging of no less than 19 people.

One’s a chilling emission from the bowels of history, the other’s a cheesy slice of laughtracked overacting. Probably not a good idea to combine the two, right?

But since when did that stop anybody …

Cable station TV Land have taken the particularly sensitive move of building a nine-foot-tall bronze statue of Elizabeth Montgomery - Bewitched’s leading lady – and erected it in the town’s public park.

Understandably, one or two discerning citizens have found themselves a little riled by all of this. "It’s like TV Land going to Auschwitz and proposing to erect a statue of Colonel Klink," said John Carr of the Salem Historic District Commission. A slight exaggeration there, John, but we see your point nonetheless. Someone in the TV Land boardroom may well need their empathy chip tinkering with.

Even more amazingly, Salem mayor Stanley Usovicz is actually defending the totem of tastlessness, claiming that it "adds to the experience of coming here".

What would Daniel Day-Lewis (DVDs) say? Something wise and earnest, probably. Or maybe he’d just run away and pretend to be a shoemaker again.

[story by C J Davies]