John Safran Versus God - Monday's at 8:30 on SBS

In his most ludicrously ambitious project yet, world-famous media hooligan John Safran scours the world in search of God…AND FINDS HIM.

Or, at least, a lot of folk who believe they have.

John Safran versus God, which commences on SBS Television on Monday, 30 August at 8.30pm, is an SBS Independent eight-part visual encyclopedia of faith around the globe – a rummage through the mosques, temples, churches and chicken coops of the religious world.

SUFFERING
The results of hundreds of hours of footage shot on five continents John Safran versus God, Safran’s first television series since 2002’s ground-breaking Music Jamboree, sees apostles of Buddhism, Catholicism, Judaism, Mormonism, Racism, Islam, Scientology and Voodoo suffering like ants under Safran’s magnifying glass. But often it’s Safran himself who feels the heat.

CONFESSING
Safran visits a radical extreme Muslim cleric to see if he will place a fatwa on the head of a popular Australian television identity. He is thrown out of the Orange County branch of the KKK after attempting to join…having confessed to his Jewish heritage. He indulges in a lonesome spiritual trek into the Arizona desert to drink Native American peyote – the promised ghostly apparitions failing to appear despite his tidal waves of vomit.

MASTURBATING
Safran confesses to, as a young man, masturbating in the bed of a Catholic priest – and is forgiven by the very priest whose bed he slept in. He doorknocks in Utah to convert Mormons to atheism then attempts to interest Salt Lake City film distributors in the trailer for his forthcoming film, Extreme Mormon, with mixed results. He is chased out of Haiti by gun-toting bandits and doused in chicken blood in Mozambique.

SOMETHING
“I’m definitely pro-religion, more so than anti-religion,” Safran reveals. “I constantly feel like I’m going to get into trouble for the things I do, even if there’s no logical reason for me to get into trouble. So that’s the reason, I think, why I must believe there is something “there”, God or whatever. Because why would I feel like I’m doing something wrong if I believed there was nobody around to punish me for it?”

EXORCISM
The sins of Safran are finally dealt with in the dramatic series finale, when John has his demons cast out in a bizarre but perhaps necessary Christian exorcism.

John Safran versus God is the result of an unholy alliance between Ghost of Your Ex-Boyfriend Productions and SBS Independent. Directed by Craig Melville, produced by Selin Yaman.