It’s a big world out there – any that’s plenty of space for all kinds of weird and wonderful lifestyles to be practiced across the globe.
In a one-hour special titled World of Weird, Channel 4 sent a variety of journalists to investigate the brilliant and the bizarre – everything from Bronies (obsessive adult male fans of My Little Pony), to apocalypse-ready ‘doomsday preppers’ in America, to a man in remote India with 39 wives and 94 children.
You can hardly accuse World of Weird of lacking variety. In its opening segment, it follows a Texan couple who have a pet, er, buffalo. He’s called Wild Thing, and he wanders freely around the house, occasionally destroying bits of furniture and his outdoor fences.
Things then move swiftly on to the Japanese phenomenon of hiring fake family members for social situations. Want to improve your social status? Just hire a bunch of actors to be your friends and relatives. Even presenter Matt Rudge has a go, acting as a fake brother for-in-law for client of the agency he visits.
From there, it only gets more bizarre - a visit to BronyCon to meet die-hard male My Little Pony fans, including a 26 year-old accountant called David, a trip to a 40-acre secret fortress in the States where people pour their money into preparing for the end of the world, and bull-fighting ‘mini-matadors’.
Gogglebox: The families
On a slightly more serious note, journalist Billie JD Porter heads to a remote area of India to investigate Ziona – a man with 39 wives and 94 children. The family all live under one roof - a huge purple mansion, where Ziona lives like royalty. His 70th birthday party has military overtones and is described as a “holy celebration like Christmas” by one of the family members, and he even has his own bagpipe band. As sinister as it sounds, it seems like a rather harmonious community.
World of Weird makes for an entertaining watch, with a similarly irreverent tone to E4’s hit RudeTube – but don’t except anything on a par to Louis Theroux’s classic Weird Weekends series. Cramming all of these stories into one episode inevitably leaves it feeling crowded – these individually fascinating topics would have made for a great series of 30-minute episodes exploring the nuances of the unusual subcultures, rather than zipping through them for shock value.
Channel 4, 10pm
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