Wonderland: The Hasidic Guide to Love, Marriage and Finding a Bride, BBC Two

Although in perhaps a less ostentatious manner than is familiar from Louis Theroux's documentaries, BBC Two's Wonderland last night nevertheless took the well-worn path of finding an odd-seeming community and examining its customs, morals and characters. In this case, it was the 20,000 Hasidic Jews of Stamford Hill, north-east London, who - we were led to believe - had some pretty funny ideas about love.

The superficial oddities of the culture must have seemed so inviting to the film-maker, Paddy Wivell: pious observance of hundreds of biblical rules of behaviour, from circumcision to toilet etiquette; the uniform of heavy black coat, large black hat, wildly long sideburns; the sequestration from other cultures. As soon as the programme began, however, it became clear that these were wrappings around eminently human behaviour.

There is certainly a gap between what appears to be the great austerity of a rule-bound life and the exuberance expressed at ubiquitous wedding celebrations. (Apparently some Stamford Hill Jews get invited to 100 weddings a year.) The bride and groom cannot touch until the end of the wedding breakfast, and indeed the men and the women are segregated at the party, but it doesn't seem to matter. Judging by the flamboyant, full-hearted cartwheeling, break dancing and klezmer moves, the men were having the time of their lives. Wivell didn't suggest that this was a response to the rules, although it seemed evident.

The film's title suggests that it was trying to explore codes of love among the Hasidim, but its subjects were poorly chosen for that. Wivell concentrated on one couple, Gaby and Tikwah, who had been married for 40 years and cheerfully admitted that their outlook, having married off their children, was different from parents with children as yet unwed, and one separated man, Avi, who was trying to marry off his second son. Neither the couple nor Avi seemed especially representative, but then those who will submit to documentaries (see last week's Made in Chelsea) rarely are.

The verb "to marry off" is indeed appropriate: he was not waiting for his son to meet a girl, settle down for a while then get married, but contacted a matchmaker to arrange a shidduch (a match). The search was complicated by Avi's past - which I won't reveal, in case you haven't seen it - and led to Avi enlisting his mother in Israel. Faithful to the terrier-stereotype of the Jewish mother, she searched until a girl was found.

Is this so astonishingly different from Jews beyond Stamford Hill, and indeed the rest of London at large, that we need a film about it? Hardly. Arranged marriages are common in other cultures, parents often try to interfere, and some people place such importance on parental approval that they may as well have chosen the affianced in the first place.

As if to emphasise the futility of the film-maker's quest for difference, Gaby came out with thoughts on marriage and life that might as well have come from a guest on Oprah's couch or The Guardian's advice column. Marriage is about being less selfish. Growing up means curbing your desires. Absent fathers affect children. This is not to say that his words are any less meaningful: they're as meaningful because they're as universal.

The film takes a strange tangent when it follows Avi to the Ukraine over the Jewish New Year, where he prays at a rabbi's shrine and bunks with some fellow Stamford Hillers. This section seems to have little bearing on the theme of love and marriage. Had Wivell been making a film exclusively about Avi, it would have been revealing; here it is an excursus of little point.

The key difference with Theroux's brand is that while he finds cultures almost incomprehensible to the viewers - the Phelps family, for example - Wivell happened upon a group of people affected by the same desires and problems as the rest of the country, even if that was not what you feel he was hoping for.

• Watch Wonderland on BBC iPlayer