Cult viewing

Jonestown (BBC 2); Moving Wallpaper & Echo Beach (ITV); Harry Hill’s TV Burp (ITV) 

‘Shut up and drink the Kool-Aid’ is an American slang phrase — tart, cynical and funny — used for telling people to get on with something they must do but would prefer to avoid. It refers back to the mass suicide of 909 members of the Jim Jones cult in Guyana in 1978. Jones had plenty of cyanide, but he thought it would sluice down more agreeably if diluted with the nasty but very sweet soft drink mix. Whether this was because he wanted to make his followers’ last moments on earth marginally less horrible, or because he thought that it would persuade the children to drink up, was not explained in Jonestown (BBC2, Sunday), but it was one of the few things left unsaid.

This was a wonderful documentary, a model, all the more effective for being precise, measured and slow. There was no intrusive voiceover; almost all the words came from survivors of the cult. To anyone who’s interested in the nature of belief, in mass persuasion and the way people can be persuaded to act entirely against their own interests, it was utterly compelling. To the British viewer (it was a UK–US co-production) it had added interest because Jones looked unnervingly like Michael Portillo, seen last month on BBC2 looking for a means of humane killing. Oddly enough, he never came up with soft drinks.

Jones himself was, like Webster, much possessed by death and not only saw the skull beneath the skin, but wanted everyone else to relish it too. As a five-year-old he killed a cat in order to have the pleasure of holding its funeral. Yet he was an idealist too: he detested racial prejudice and believed that even the poor should have good healthcare and nursing in old age — views that seemed perilously close to socialism in the America of the 1950s and 60s.