British pastor claims beloved children's TV show Rainbow was 'gay propaganda'

The pastor suggested that the show's opening sequence, which features a rainbow opening a book, could represent the rainbow 'infiltrating the Bible'

Children loved Rainbow's strange cast of characters like George, Bungle and Zippy (ITV)

A London-based Christian pastor has claimed that the beloved childrens' TV show Rainbow, which appeared weekly for 20 years on ITV throughout the 1980s, was actually a long-running piece of gay propaganda.

As PinkNews reports, Daniel Erickson-Hull, or 'Pastor D' from the End Times News Ministry, explained his views in a YouTube video.

In the video, titled '1970s childrens TV stated plan to 'homosexualise all children'', the Pastor asks whether the Rainbow theme tune, which tells the viewer to "paint the whole world with a rainbow," was in fact a thinly-veiled message to get children to turn gay.

Referring to a part of the show's opening sequence, in which an animated rainbow pushes open the pages of a book, the video asks whether it is supposed to represent the "rainbow infiltrating the Bible."

The video closes by saying: "Perhaps there is nothing in this, a coincidence? But it seemed worth raising as a possibility."

Many of the video's viewers appear to agree with the suggestion. One wrote that two of Rainbow's main characters, Bungle the bear and furry pink hippo George were "extremely camp".

Another wrote: "The music sounded very gay to me. And the guy with the puppets? He may very well be married to a male puppet. Any guy with a bunch of puppets you have to wonder about."

The rainbow flag first rose to prominence as a symbol of the LGBT community during the San Francisco pride parades of the late 1970s, and became more popular after the assassination of openly gay San Francisco city supervisor Harvey Milk in 1978.

However, the rainbow also has a very biblical connotation, representing God's covenant with Earth in the wake of the huge flood described in the Book of Genesis.

As PinkNews mentioned, Mr Erickson-Hull has previously called same-sex marriage an "abomination", and said homosexuality is "hideous".