Cohen's Borat sparks TV storm

Ali G comedian Sacha Baron Cohen's latest show is to be investigated by broadcasting watchdogs after complaints about a sketch featuring an anti-Semitic song.

Viewers reacted angrily to Borat's Television Programme after it showed the character Borat, a fictional reporter from Kazakhstan, played by Baron Cohen, singing a country and western-style number called Throw the Jew Down the Well.

The TV regulator Ofcom, Channel 4 and the Jewish Board of Deputies have all received complaints about the sketch, which was shown on Channel 4 last Friday.

It showed a bar full of country and western fans enthusiastically joining in with the lyrics which included: 'In my country there is a problem/And that problem is the Jew/They take everybody money/And never give it back.'

The chorus, which had the bar singing and dancing, went: 'Throw the Jew down the well/ So my country can be free/ You must grab him by the horns/ Then we have a big party.'

There is, of course, no doubt that Baron Cohen, 32, was being satirical. Born to Jewish parents in North London, Baron Cohen is still an active member of the religion-and his Australian actress fiancee Isla Fisher is converting to Judaism before they marry.

But the lyrics of the song, which also prompted hundreds of complaints when it was broadcast in the U.S., have been reprinted on dozens of sites on the Internet, with some of them taking the words at face value.

'He's not the only one who wants to throw the Jew down the well, ha ha,' wrote one correspondent on an Islamic site.

Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, a U.S.-based

pressure group, has written to Baron Cohen to complain about the sketch, saying he believed it to be 'dangerous'.

'While we understand this scene was an attempt to show how easily a group of ordinary people can be encouraged to join in an anti-Semitic chorus, we are concerned that the irony may have been lost on some of the audience, or worst still that they simply accepted Borat's statements about Jews at face value,' he told the Jewish Chronicle. It is a very thin line between what's offensive and what's supposed to be funny and that line was crossed.'

Also on the two-part show - which is due to finish tonight - Baron Cohen got a prospective U.S. congressman to admit he believes only Christians go to Heaven, leaving Jews to go to Hell.

In the second show, a Texan game hunter happily confides his anti-Semitic feelings.

'They were so bad in Germany, controlling the money and everything that the Germans said we are going to have a final solution and kill them all.'