Wonderland: the end of the world bus tour BBC2, 9.50pm
Another object lesson in documentary film-making from Wonderland: get in ultra-close, expose a measure of your own humanity to win your subject's confidence - and then be prepared for awkward truths.
In making The End of the World Bus Tour, David Clews possibly reckoned he'd be profiling easily ridiculed folk who were unaware how extreme and bizarre their views might appear to those who don't share them. In fact, it transpired that Clews's subjects did realise how odd their beliefs make them look to sceptics - and they didn't care. For the most part, they weren't to be ridiculed. They were to be feared.
Clews joined a party of 46 Christian fundamentalists - mostly American, some making their first trip outside the US - on what was, for them, literally the holiday of a lifetime: a 10-day pre-Apocalypse tour of the Holy Land. Their brand of Christianity seemed to have little to do with what I've always understood to be its central precept - love - and more with sanctimoniousness.
Wonderland's smug voyagers were all joyously convinced that the "end times" are nigh. For them, Doomsday is just around the corner, maybe within the next decade. Their trip to Israel thus constituted a last chance to see the valley of Armageddon before it becomes the battlefield for God's final, victorious, world-destroying showdown with Satan and his human army of non-believers.
Why do they find this violent process of fiery mass extinction such a joyous prospect? Because, as true believers, they will first have experienced the Rapture, being magically whisked away into an afterlife of eternal bliss in the nick of time prior to God's big gun-down.
Wonderland soon established that the apocalyptic trippers' overly literal interpretation of the Bible veered readily into the martial realm of bad fifties sci-fi movies - only instead of little green men from outer space, Clews's subjects had identified the enemy of their brand of Christianity as Islam. Hence, for one elderly American holidaymaker, the thrillsome highlight of her Holy Land tour was donning an Israeli army camouflage outfit and picking up litter on one of its military bases adjoining the Syrian border. "They have the finest army and the finest God," she grinned, aligning the two forces rather chillingly.
Oddly, it was around this point that Clews confided he was enjoying his fellow-trippers' company. In truth, it was hard not to warm to Claude and Dolores, from South Carolina, whose simple faith evidently provided them with genuine consolation in the aftermath of a grievous loss: the sudden death of their only child.
It was much less easy, however, to thole stone-faced English teen Hannah. Her certainty was depressing. "We're all born with an evil heart," she informed Clews, going on to assure him that, as a non-believer, he's destined after death to burn in hell for eternity.
It was marginally more easy to like maritally troubled Barbara - six husbands, one physically abusive father - but only up to a point. That point came when Barbara told Clews she'd had a vision from God, telling her to take a photograph of him and his film crew in a location that would only become apparent when they all went out and looked for it.
This proved to be near a barbed-wire fence overlooking the Palestinian West Bank. Barbara stared through the tangled wire into the distance. "You need to take a look at God's enemies," she idly mused. "Palestinians Iranians " At this, Clews stressed the need for being able to see both sides of an argument. Barbara's reply made it plain that her particular brand of faith hails narrow-mindedness. And so emerged the most awkward of truths.
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