Byline Season 2 Episodes

Episode 1

Embracing the Bear

Episode 2

For Better or for Worse

Episode 3

Blind to Science

Episode 4

Johnny and Alf Go Home

Episode 5

The Blasphemers' Banquet

The Blasphemers' Banquet is a passionate defense of Salman Rushdie's right to freedom of speech, even it if involves blasphemy. This defense unfolds through the deceptively simple structural conceit of a restaurant meal in Bradford (the town where a copy of The Satanic Verses was burnt in public) to which blasphemers past and present are invited. None of course turns up, most because they are already dead, Rushdie because by then he was in hiding for his life. Into this simple frame is introduced a rich tapestry of ideas and meditations involving the nature of blasphemy (Voltaire, Molière, Byron), the curse of fundamentalist religions, and the joy of our fleeing but passionate life seen from the perspective of a militant unbeliever.