#End of Days, Podcast on BBC5Live, presented by Chris Warburton, produced by Ciaran Tracey and music by Hex from the album, Earth.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/search?filter=programmes&q=End%20Of%20Days&suggid=urn%3Abbc%3Aprogrammes%3Ap06qc33m

I asked my girlfriend if she’d heard of Waco. No, she hadn’t. That shocked me a bit. But I’m the reader that sometimes writes stuff in the family, nobody ever reads. And, of course, I’d heard of David Koresh, but I didn’t know that wasn’t his real name, he’d picked it for the biblical resonance in the same way Shirley Crabtree called himself Big Daddy and John Wayne called himself John Wayne. I’ve got my own  beliefs about the four horsemen of the apocalypse coming here soon induced by global warming, but hopefully I’ll be dead by then, but I’ve no great belief in the great hear-ever-after. If it’s any consolation I know the dates the world never ended. 1874, 1914, 1918, 1925 and 1975. The Messianic Kingdom didn’t happen and the view from the Watchtower was they’d gotten it wrong, but they’d get it right the next time. It’s a blood sport. Us and Them.  I might even have lucked into Koresh’s association with the Seventh-Day Adventists and a splinter group of a splinter group, the Branch Davidians. There’s a kind of meme repeated in the podcast that sums up that general sense of knowing something, the whackos from Waco. That ties in with my worldview of politics in America and the moron’s moron being elected President of the United States, or the disunited States, would be more appropriate tag. Waco is in Texas and is the kind of place revivalist preachers like Burt Lancaster’s Elmer Gantry flourished in real life and where the soft drink Sergeant Pepper was borne for those that didn’t like moonshine whisky.  

God’s not alone, with a slew of books and films about the End of Days and Armageddon. Tara Westover’s Educated, for example, begins with Tara, aged seven, ‘in a little patch of Idaho’ with no birth certificate and no schooling, watching her Mormon father burying rifles and preparing for The Day of Abomination and asking God for his help in the coming shoot-out with the Feds who were coming to get them. Someone is always coming to get you at the End of Days.

Thirty people from London, Manchester and Nottingham at Waco, of mainly African-Caribbean origin, were inside the compound at Mount Carmel. Twenty-six of the seventy-two men, women and children that died came from Britain and had followed David Koresh to their deaths.  He was labelled leader of a death cult and a false prophet by security forces. And the FBI coordinated siege which lasted fifty-one days and ended in tragedy on the 19th April 1993 was called appropriately enough by the authorities ‘Showtime’.  

Chris Warburton and producer Ciaran Tracey take a more measured approach than Showtime. Their aim was almost anthropological to find out who these British citizens were, where they lived and what they worked at and how they’d come into contact with David Koresh and decided to give up their lives and follow him back to Waco. I don’t need to tell you anymore. Taste and see.