The ladies like Mitchell. He’s good-looking, suave and confident. There’s only one problem: He’s a blood-sucking vampire struggling “with going cold turkey from the blood he craves.” Mitchell lives in an apartment with Annie and George. Annie is a creepy yet talkative ghost. George is a lovable and nerdy porter at the local hospital who has a dark side. One night each month he becomes a flesh-eating werewolf.

Pretty dark, huh?

Not according to the bbc, which airs Being Human in a prime 10 p.m. time slot. It makes a person wonder: What does the bbc consider too dark for prime time? Sir Paul Coleridge, British High Court judge, can tell you. He appears in a recently finished two-part documentary exploring the breakdown of British families and the disastrous effect household implosions are having on British society. Mr. Coleridge is livid at the British Broadcasting Corporation because it deemed The Death of Respect unsuitable for prime-time television and relegated it to a red-eye slot close to midnight. Why?

Because the documentary is “too dark,” Coleridge was told, not “sufficiently positive or life-affirming,” and not the “kind of program which the bbc likes to make nowadays.”

Judge Coleridge lamented the broken state of British families in a speech before the Family Holiday Association last week. His message, which forms the essence of the soon-coming documentary—and stems from a 37-year career in family law, the last eight as a judge—is sobering. But it’s the truth. With a little amplification, it could prove influential in helping some British families realize, and perhaps even claw their way out of, the hole they’ve dug themselves into. If you can spare the time, I recommend you read Coleridge’s somber yet refreshingly honest speech in its entirety.

Last week, the Telegraph ran a shorter, edited version of the speech. “There is a tendency, especially among the chattering classes, to assume that we have attained a social utopia, in which we are entirely and happily free from taboos, stigmas and other constraints on behavior,” said the High Court judge. “It sounds so beguiling: Let us all do what we want, when we want, and sort out any mess as we go along.”

But are these new notions of marriage and family working? Coleridge continued (emphasis mine):

[S]urely the test of any social change is whether it enhances people’s lives or makes them more miserable. And this is where I take issue with the modern view of the family. If it is so successful, why are the statistics for separation so large? More significantly, why are the family courts overwhelmed with cases involving damaged, miserable or disturbed children? How do other children, caught up in less-serious separations, really feel? Do they relish the endless changes of partner, or adapting to a new step-parent and step-siblings?

It is impossible to overstate the pertinence of those queries. Their answers are at the heart of Britain’s slide into moral and societal oblivion, an undeniable reality quantified by the tidal wave of divorces and broken homes sweeping Britain, not to mention the pool of shocking statistics exposing the unwed pregnancy, drug, alcoholism and violence crises among British teens. “I fear that the current state of the family represents change for the worse,” said Coleridge, “and those most affected, the children, are not considered in the maelstrom that surrounds them.”

It’s rare for the general public to be provided with such a unique and profound glimpse into the inner recesses of Britain’s family court system, especially by a widely-respected and experienced High Court judge. Indeed, one bbc producer, after spending a day in the trenches with Coleridge, “was simply stunned into silence by the whole experience,” according to the judge. Coleridge continued:

She was rendered even more speechless when I told her that within the Royal Courts of Justice, on that very day, there were about another 20 judges engaged in similar cases …. By glancing quickly via the Internet at the published lists for the day, covering just the inner London family courts, it was possible to calculate that on that day alone well over 100 courts were dealing with family breakdown in one guise or another. I invited her to multiply the problem across the rest of the country, the big cities, if she wanted to get some feel for the scale of the epidemic.

One of the bbc’s own producers was blown away by her day in a family court. Yet her bosses decided to relegate the two-part comprehensive exposé of this critical issue to late-night television, largely out of sight!

Even John Ware, a longtime, award-winning bbc journalist and the producer of the documentary, couldn’t believe such a vital program was so easily brushed aside. “We are all very disappointed about the delay and the late slot, but more importantly, I think it’s the wrong call for license fee payers,” he said. “The extent to which we have a fragmented society is a huge talking point today and not one just confined to the metropolitan elite.”

Let’s get this straight. The Death of Respect is an educational and informative documentary, produced by an award-winning journalist, featuring exclusive insight from a prestigious High Court judge, that addresses an issue that is currently a “huge talking point” in Britain. Its own bbc producers found it enlightening, even stunning. There’s a term for shows like this: rating bonanza. Yet bbc executives pushed it out of prime time and want to run it at 11:20 p.m., after most Britons are in bed. Why? Because it’s “too dark.”

Meanwhile, Mitchell the blood-sucking vampire and George the nerdy, flesh-eating werewolf peddle their craft every Tuesday in the prime 10 p.m. slot!

There’s a disturbing reason for this duplicity.

Why does the bbc air Being Human and smother The Death of Respect? Because showing a stunning documentary that exposes British families dissolving and the impact it is having on society contradicts and undermines the bbc’s broad, ANTI-FAMILY agenda, not to mention the bulk of its television shows.

The bbc doesn’t want to draw attention to The Death of Respect because the bbc is guilty of helping create the problem that the documentary so powerfully exposes.

How does the bbc facilitate family breakdown? For starters, just read the descriptions of prime-time bbc shows like Personal Affairs, Eastenders,Gavin and Stacey and Mistresses. These shows are anti-family to their core. Their plots are largely comprised of promiscuous, perverted and illicit sexual themes and scenes: homosexual embraces, wife-swapping and threesomes. Adultery and fornication are givens—considered “normal.” Unwed pregnancy is mere inconvenience. Absentee fatherhood routine. Divorce comes standard.

Moreover, these shows are sound bites from a broader message being pushed globally. The bbc, using its expansive network of tax-funded television studios, radio stations, Internet media and print publications, is one of the most powerful forces of liberalism in the world, and its politically correct, multicultural, pro-homosexual, anti-family agenda permeates to one extent or another virtually everything it produces.

Toward the end of his speech, Mr. Coleridge advocated a refreshing solution to the failing British family. “There is no quick-fix solution,” he said, “although the reaffirmation of marriage as the gold standard would be a start: Statistically, it has proved to be the most enduring relationship, and the best environment for children.”

Imagine that! Evidence shows that traditional marriage, which is an exclusive and binding relationship between one man and one woman, is the “best environment for children.” The bbc ought to stop attacking marriage and family and start pushing it—not just for the benefit of individual children or even parents, but for the benefit of the nation of Britain!

Marriage and family was a subject close to the heart of late educator Herbert W. Armstrong. “The very foundation of any nation’s solidarity, strength and power is a solid and stable family structure,” he once wrote. “When a nation’s family life is breaking down, that nation is disintegrating—committing national suicide!” Mr. Armstrong loved the institution of family, and one of his greatest teachings was in regard to the deep spiritual element to physical marriage and family. (We’d like to share that teaching with you. RequestThe Missing Dimension in Sex to read of the amazing purpose for family.)

The spiritual vision embodied in the institutions of marriage and family is what is really under attack in the assault on marriage and family. “Today in the affluent countries a conspiracy is developing which seeks to destroy marriage as an institution, as well as the family,” Mr. Armstrong wrote. “This is another decisive bit of evidence that this world’s civilization is definitely in the end time—the end of this world as we know it!” (Plain Truth, October/November 1978).

Bible prophecy says that the breakdown of marriage and family is a sign that we are in the end time, the time just prior to Jesus Christ’s Second Coming. In Matthew 24, for example, Christ Himself said that at that time there would be universal evil, and that the people would be “eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage.” Obviously, there is nothing wrong with marriage (or eating or drinking). Christ is saying here that marriage in the end time would be widely misused and abused!

Jesus Himself said that the God-ordained institutions of marriage and family would come under attack. The Death of Respect proves this attack is intensifying. The bbc’s decision to air the program when most people are asleep shows the assault is more successful than most people know.