Television: John Safran.

Considering how often the phrase ‘must-see television’ is bandied about for such unworthy shite, it’s a little risky attaching the cliché to a show that truly deserves it. John Safran Vs. God truly deserves it. It’s mind-fuckingly entertaining, ludicrously funny, extraordinarily well-made and sometimes incredibly disturbing. John Safran has never been in better form. He has produced genuine must-see television.

Safran’s adventures in this latest series read impressively: he’s whacked by sticks in a Buddhist temple, he confesses to masturbating in the bed of a Catholic priest, he has an extreme Muslim cleric put a fatwa on Rove, he faces voodoo and gun-toting militia in Haiti, he comes face-to-face with the Ku Klux Klan and - in the memorable finale - he has his demons exorcised by a charismatically insane American bloke.

Was there a moment when Safran knew the series was good? "In the first bit we did, I got hit by sticks,” he says. “The crew was like ‘that’s really cool, you got hit by sticks.’” Getting hit by sticks is one thing, but Safran really seems to be tempt fate when he goes to Haiti. “‘Haiti was the only bit where it got through to my thick skull – at the actual time I was doing it – that this is fucked,” says Safran.

In Haiti, Safran’s crew speed out of a market village when they’re told violent militia are on the lose. “Basically the whole world’s set up for tourists. Places are either rich like Japan or America so there’s taxis and stuff like that. Or there’s India, where people earn their money by taking tourists around,” says Safran. “Haiti’s just real old-school. Haiti’s like you imagine deepest, darkest Africa in the 1890s. There’s no public transport, there’s no taxis. If you haven’t worked out things beforehand, you’re just stuck there.”

Haiti also sees Safran dance around at a Day of the Dead ceremony, in which enthusiastic Haitian punters suck on freshly cut out testicles of a lamb. Safran refrains from sucking the testes. “I didn’t not put the goat’s testicles in my mouth because I thought ‘oh, should I put them in or not?’ It didn’t occur to me at the time. I was just a bit confused,” he says. “I am vaguely disappointed in myself a bit.” The lamb is then killed on camera, which will apparently be cut out of the version that goes to air. I tell Safran the scene reminded me of the conclusion to Apocalypse Now. He laughs, “when I there I wasn’t thinking that cleverly.”

So how does he psyche himself up for such international madness? “It’s easy to be a big talker when you’re not there,” he says of Haiti. The dangers of confronting the Ku Klux Klan were largely ignored. “It’s a bit like when you speed at night, where you actually know on some theoretical level ‘the consequences of this could lead to me being a quadriplegic for the rest of my life,’” he says. “[But] you don’t really make the connection; you think ‘it won’t happen to me.’”

(Originally published in The Brag).