MUCH MOCKERY is being made of actress Liz Hurley of late for her portrayal of Delilah in the American mini series The Bible: Samson and Delilah.

What kind of a flop is it, according to the newspapers?

It is of Biblical proportions.

You would have guessed that. To a sub editor, there is an irresistible attraction (which the London Times and Irish Independent gave in to) in the headline "Hurley stars in a flop of Biblical proportions", but in these days of high technology printing that is a misnomer. Indeed it is wildly anachronistic.

I have beside me (courtesy of the office library) an Oxford University Press edition of the Holy Book, and though it has nearly 1,200 pages it is only a little larger, and heavier, than an average paperback. Is it new? Not exactly. It is a 1971 edition. And it is considerably less weighty than the standard block buster, "Aga saga" or beach book.

Some of those currently on sale are certainly of Biblical proportions if one is thinking of Bible editions of perhaps 50 years ago. I will say nothing about the availability of the Bible in easily portable form on CDRom.

As to the mini series itself (which will be shown on Sky 1 from next Wednesday) production values are apparently poor, the sets worse and the wardrobes ludicrous, with Ms Hurley's head dress evoking (according to one critic) Bernard Bresslaw's in Carry On Up the Khyber.

Still, I hardly think it is helpful or fair to describe the series, as one critic did, as a "Book of Judges pot boiler". Ironically, the Samson Delilah story itself is hardly of Biblical proportions, taking up as it does a mere three pages or so.

Much of this somewhat cruel critical amusement derives from an attitude to the Old Testament story characters that is at worst antagonistic, at best ignorant.

Let us consider Delilah. She was a Philistine who was bribed to entrap Samson, an example of entrapment long before American police forces came up with the concept. She coaxed Samson into revealing that the secret of his strength was in his long hair, then betrayed him to the Philistines and had a slave cut his hair off while he slept.

For this, her name has become synonymous with treachery. There is, by the way, no evidence that Delilah was at all voluptuous: that notion only started when Cecil B. de Mille got his paws on the story back in 1949. (As he told the scriptwriter, "It's just a damn good hot tale, so don't get a lot of thees, thous and thums on your mind.")

The fact is that poor Delilah was tempted by 1,100 pieces of silver, an awful lot more than Judas got for his betrayal many years later. Low in self confidence to start with, she didn't believe Samson thought a lot of her: he picked her up only after he had finished dallying with the harlots of Gaza.

Samson had his own problems. Today, he and his dysfunctional family would be in group therapy. When he picked out a likely wife a Philistine, the ma and da were horrified that he should think of marrying outside his own tribe, the Dan.

He married her anyway. The wife then betrayed him by helping her fellow Philistines avoid payment to Samson in a pub quiz contest, or equivalent thereof, by giving them the answers. Rather annoyed, Samson eased his irritation by killing 30 men, then returned to find that his parents, reckoning that their son had now finished with his wife, had handed her over to a friend.

It is not hard to imagine how a man might feel.

As a Nazarite, Samson was obliged to abstain from strong drink, so he generally stuck to low alcohol beer. This apparently drove him bonkers from time to time, which doesn't surprise me in the least. After the debacle with the wife, Samson again became rather upset, so he burned the Philistine grain fields, and as an afterthought killed 1,000 Philistines with an ass's jaw bone, the favoured assault weapon of the time.

So it went on. Whoring was not proscribed for Nazarites, and Samson's life mostly revolved around relationships with Philistine members of the opposite sex, not unlike modern Hollywood stars.

The business of the hair cutting is well known, as is the cruel business of Samson being left eyeless in a Gaza prison, and his final revenge.

The rest is retold above in order to keep the whole thing in proper perspective and give Liz Hurley a fair run as Delilah before the mini series is finally written off. {CORRECTION} 96121100060