In the second episode of Safran's Race Relations, the white boy from Jewtown 3183 (aka East St Kilda) "became" a black man. Whether he transformed through make-up, chemical treatment or some other means, the show didn't explain, but as more than one person commented, he was the strangest-looking mother ever to prowl the streets of San Francisco. "You look like a white dude with a real tan," Wonder, a black man of mixed parentage (white Jew, black Buddhist) and enlightened outlook, told him.

Safran took his tan to an open-mic night where he rapped about Melbourne trams; to an all-night wiener joint staffed by black people and customised by whites, where the hottest item on the menu was the racist slurs hurled back and forth across the counter; to a speed-dating session for African-Americans only; and to a black church where he spoke with straight face and great passion about being raised in a white Jewish family in Melbourne as if he were white, repressing the black man inside, until now when he's realised that he, like the Rev James Moody and Barack Obama, was a proud black man. Hallelujah!

Whatever else you might say about Safran, he's got chutzpah.

An hour earlier, I'd been sitting in a cinema watching Michael Jackson's almost-a-concert film This Is It. There were a few audience walkouts (it is a bit bloated and long, but only a bit), there were some cheers and squeals of delight at the end, and there was coda after coda as the film – and Jackson – refused to go away. But mostly, there was the overwhelming evidence that even at 50, and clearly not in his physical prime, the guy was hugely talented.

And what Jackson had in common with Safran is the refusal to acknowledge barriers.

Safran smashes through the barriers he confronts - race, religion, "good" taste - in his self-appointed mission to expose the hypocrisy and bigotry that lie behind "that’s just the way it is". True, there were moments in this rehash of John Howard Griffin's Black Like Me experiment of 50 years ago that came awfully close to blaxploitation, and true, it was impossible not to wonder what would happen to all that brotherly love if Safran's make-up (or whatever it was) started to smudge, but there's always going to be some collateral damage in an approach like his. Not everything works, but what's not to love in a project that seeks to expose the fear and loathing behind racism?