Channel 4's Immigration (un)Reality TV

This isn't revelatory, it's pornography

Image: Channel 4

I write this completely aware that the purpose of Channel 4's 'Go Back to Where You Came From' is to trigger outraged screeds from bien pensant metropolitan liberal snowflakes. But I suspect that is the main reason of this programme’s existence, and the producers' pretence of trying to change minds or elicit empathy or engage different audiences is at best flawed and at worst a cynical façade, and so I feel perfectly fine denouncing this Victorian-level racist freakshow and mourning that the presumably staggering sum of money spent on it was not invested in something worthwhile that could positively contribute to what is so often mistakenly referred to as the immigration ‘debate’ in the UK.

The premise of GBTWYCF is that six 'opinionated' British people with 'views across the immigration argument' will be immersed in the 'reality' of the perilous journeys refugees and migrants make to the UK. They are dropped into 'high risk locations' to experience the threat of 'near-by missile strikes, witnessing mass overcrowding of camps, and being up close to those living in devastating poverty' and then travel onto 'migrant routes' trekking through the African desert, climbing over border crossings, through mountain ranges, and 'experience first-hand the terror of small boat crossings'. Will these experiences alter the contestants' views on immigration? 'Tackling the issue head on', it claims, 'it will confront, educate, anger, shock and tug at the heartstrings of liberals, the right wing and everyone in between.'

In reality, GBTWYCF is nothing more than an unimaginative, exploitative and expensive trolling exercise in which any trace elements of its dubious educational purpose are dwarfed by its gleeful sensationalism. Even more than its amplification of racist rhetoric, its grotesque parodies of both refugees, British people and opinions on immigration tell us much more about the ignorance and biases of programme’s makers and commissioners than anything else. This is merely the latest in a long line of Channel 4's human bear baiting output like Big Fat Gypsy Weddings, or Benefits Street which revels in making us point and laugh at poor people and make us all hate each other even deeper. That’s somewhat ironic, considering the channel’s excellent news coverage and insightful documentaries.

The six characters are split into two teams, the first taken to the Syrian city of Raqqa, slowly picking up the pieces after brutalisation by Islamic State who made it their de-facto capital during sometimes indiscriminate US-led coalition airstrikes. The second team flies to the Somali capital Mogadishu, wracked with lawlessness and terrorism since civil war in the nineties and now one of the world's fastest growing cities due to internal displacement from drought-stricken parts of the country. I have added the most basic context myself, since viewers are told little about the places and people who live there and instead mainly hear from contestant Nathan, a hulking Yorkshireman whose makes repeated observations of how much a 'shithole' the place is. In a very unconvincing scene, the team's security team advise them to pull out of a market because too many people had been looking at them the wrong way, as if a troupe of Brits doing a poverty safari wearing bullet proof vests rolling around in armoured cars trailed by security advisors and cameras is supposed to blend in.

Some viewers have pointed out how one of the 'immigration sceptic' characters, a chef called Dave from Nottingham, is emotionally moved when confronted with some children in Raqqa sifting through fly-infested garbage bins. But so what? This is the same man who appears in the very beginning of the show, standing on the cliffs of Dover staring into the camera advocating that migrants are like rats who will 'keep coming' and that they should be blown up by mines laid by the Royal Navy. The programme makers chose to position him there standing facing the sea where people in rubber boats continue to drown. I don't think that the producers fed him that line, but is it the first time he said it? Did he mention it in a previous conversation with producers and was gently reminded of it again when he had a camera pointed at him in Dover? It matters, because this isn't just loose talk, it’s hate speech, in a country where mobs attempted to burn asylum seekers alive in hotels just a few months ago.

A young woman named Chloe observes the same wretched children scrabbling around the rubble for plastic to recycle and says that the kids clear enjoy the activity and are “getting an entrepreneurial kick out of it.” She later says that Britain is going to be “a hellhole full of people wearing burkas” and that “I know my views are basic common sense.” But it’s not only the anti-immigration characters that have dreadful views. Bushra says bluntly that “a large portion of British people are thick as shit.” Do these lines feel a little bit too rehearsed? A bit too hammed up? Well there’s a reason for that, which brings us to the programme’s fundamental dishonesty. Chloe is described as a ‘social media manager’ which may well be her job, which she does alongside being a frequent pundit on the right-wing GB News channel. Bushra also provides punditry on GB News alongside BBC, ITV and Talk TV though she is described as a ’small business owner’ (she is also a former candidate on The Apprentice). Dave the chef is a TikTok content creator with around 350k followers and Mathilda, the other pro-immigration voice, is a journalist and a podcaster.

In other words, most of these contestants are not average Brits but professional gobshites who sell their opinions for money. I don’t know if they were also paid to be on this show. That doesn’t mean that their opinions are not shared by some people across the UK, they certainly are. I have lived, worked and travelled in various parts of the country, from cities to suburbia to villages, and have heard hateful invective being spat from a provocative few. But the British public are far more likely to give more fair-minded and sympathetic thoughts on the plight of refugees when they are presented with compelling stories and context rather than propaganda and pernicious polling, and are given to more humane answers when asked nuanced questions rather than being goaded into taking strident binary views. I’ve heard far more advocates for controlled Ukraine-style refugee programmes than I have calls for extrajudicial murder on the border. Most people in Britain aren’t paid to foghorn their opinions online and on air so the idea that these professional bloviators are representative of the country is misleading, perhaps intentionally.

GBFTWYCF is a four-part series but I’ve seen enough. I just doubt it becomes profound halfway through. I feel I should extend some solidarity to the journalist character Mathilda who covers immigration and humanitarian issues (after all, that’s what I do) but she ends up appearing like a straight-out-of-central-casting patronising liberal when giving lectures on white privilege and far-right discourse to fellow contestants who are screaming about migrants being pedophiles and racists. The show is so utterly contrived and insultingly exploitative of everyone that I question the judgement of anyone willing to be in it. One of the executive producers has defended the views expressed as being “the voices we were hearing up and down the country as we were casting…”. ‘Up and down the country’ in this case clearly meaning ‘the GB News green room and scrolling Twitter.’ Also, the 1990’s Comic Relief style portrayal of poverty-stricken Syrians and Somalis show that the producers also don’t understand the profile of people taking small boats to the UK – it is primarily persecution rather than destitution from which they flee, the truly impoverished rarely make it to the west - though in fairness there is a section in which a Somali woman explains to the team about domestic violence and FGM.

Gareth Benest from the International Broadcast Trust has written a very fair and much more polite assessment of the show, pointing out that if GBTWYCF was made as a serious documentary it would not get nearly as high viewing figures and appeal mainly to sympathetic audiences. It's a good point but it would have more force if the show was not so pathetically lazy, dishonest and deliberately offensive as well as being played for laughs for an audience that the programme makers clearly think are too ignorant to handle complexity and nuance. What’s the use of a coveted primetime slot if it is squandered by something of such limited educational value, that perpetuates cartoonish stereotypes and reduces the drivers of flight and displacement to a Hunger Games style pantomime full of professional attention seekers? There is one thing that should go back to where it came from - this show, back to the tiny minds of TV execs.