Danny Wallace has founded a cult devoted to spontaneous acts of kindness. Damian Thompson reports.
Some religious cults practise "love bombing", smothering would-be recruits in bogus affection. The followers of Danny Wallace do something almost equally strange. They hang around pubs, looking for a pensioner drinking on his own. When they spot one, they buy the old boy a pint - and dash out of the door before he can thank them.
"We are not a cult," protests Wallace, 26, a former BBC producer. But then, all cult leaders say that. What he cannot deny is that, in little more than a year, he has acquired 2500 followers, many of whom joined him without having the faintest idea what his movement was about. And nor, at first, did he.
In February last year, Wallace placed a classified ad in Loot magazine that read simply: "Join me. Send one passport-sized photograph to..." and gave his address. He had been bored that day: resting between projects. He just wanted to see what would happen.
Two days later, an equally bored man called Christian Jones read the advert over breakfast and, on an impulse, sent his photograph to Wallace. In doing so, he became Joinee Jones, the first follower. His flatmate Dave Cobbett followed suit. The two of them met Wallace, and a movement gradually took shape, known as "Join Me" and based around a single doctrine.
Joinees are required to perform an act of kindness, preferably for a stranger, every Friday. Hence "good Fridays". This can take any form, but the archetypal good deed, one that has almost acquired the status of a sacrament, is the unsolicited pint.
"Kind acts are easier to perform if you treat them as a joke," says Wallace. "It breaks through the embarrassment barrier that normally stops people helping strangers."
Britain's first postmodern spiritual leader is beefy and blokeish. "I'm a scruffy, specky guy who eats processed cheese straight from the fridge. Why would anyone follow me?" he asks.
But this is disingenuous: he is also an award-winning producer. Also, two years ago he co-authored Are You Dave Gorman?, an account of a six-month search for men who bore the same name as his best mate. He ended up founding a global network of Dave Gormans.
In doing so, he made a curious discovery: thanks to the instant allegiances created by the internet, a good joke can germinate into a community.
Cults and communes have traditionally been hard to start. In 1945, for example, a Swiss farmer named Gallus Breitenmoser decided to found a commune near Zurich. He reckoned that he could attract 100 people. He managed three. Danny Wallace is Gallus's great-nephew.
Wallace decided that his movement needed a raison d'etre. Once again, great-uncle Gallus provided the inspiration. In one of his letters, the thwarted guru had written: "It is better, think I, always to make happy, those gentlemen who are in advance of you in years!" And so, "make an old man happy" became Wallace's first commandment.
An opportunity presented itself almost immediately. A couple of joinees walking past a pub in Hammersmith spotted a white-haired man gazing into half a pint. One of them asked him: "Is there anything we can do to make you happy?"
"I don't think so," muttered the man, and explained that his car had broken down and he had no money for the train fare back to Devon. "I think we can help," said the joinees, and gave him £38 for his ticket and a sandwich.
The man, who introduced himself as Raymond Price, was touched. "It is as if someone from above has sent you," he said.
Later someone sent Wallace a newspaper cutting. "Con artist sentenced for trail of deception," said the headline. "Raymond Price, 59, specialised in cheating kind-hearted members of the public. He toured the south claiming his car had broken down and he needed cash for his train fare home."
Join Me's first act of philanthropy had backfired. Even now, Wallace finds it hard to believe. "He was straight out of prison," he says. Undeterred, Wallace broadened the movement's ethos to include any good deed, however small.
Wallace has written a book about Join Me, subtitled: "The true story of a man who started a cult by accident". It's an enjoyable read, thanks to his self-deprecating wit, but it's not clear how seriously he takes his experiment. Will he keep it going now that the book is out? "Absolutely," he says. "This is only the beginning."