Plus, a Jane Austen drama with one thing missing…. Back in the midth-century heyday of behavioural psychology, inventive professors were forever devising new experiments to study volunteers in extreme but revealing roleplay — as torturers, prisoners or prison guards. Instead, it draws on an even scarier sector of society: members of the public. The odd thing is, though, that they never seem like normal people but exactly like the sort of outspoken attention-seekers who are destined to appear on a fish-out-of-water TV show.
The idea is characteristically simple. Send two groups of three Britons to a couple of highly unstable, refugee-producing countries: Syria and Somalia. Ensure that in each trio there are two people who are staunchly opposed to illegal migration and one sympathiser, then let the camera capture their responses as they follow well-trodden migrant and people-smuggler routes back home.
Was it to protect the participants from the threat of Islamic State and al-Shabaab or from each other? There was a lot of this kind of talk that felt induced and shaming for all concerned. Yet the first episode was surprisingly free of major confrontations. When informed by a female Somali church worker of the near universal application of female genital mutilation and the widespread practice of young girls being forced into marriage, Jess argued that Somali men coming to the UK would think it normal to marry girls at In Syria, Bushra, a small business owner from Surrey, was happy to generalise, at least when it came to her fellow Britons.
Bunch of lying scumbags. Channel 4 duly distanced itself from these statements, but they raised an inconvenient human truth. People who make the most noise about their humanity often turn out to harbour deep hatreds of some or other group and not infrequently Jews.
It points not just to rank hypocrisy but human complexity. And unfortunately, migration and asylum are far more complex than any contributor here allowed. The animating question of Go Back to Where You Came From is whether the change of scene from comfy armchair to war-torn streets leads to a change of heart. We saw Dave crying after meeting a couple of young kids scavenging for plastic in a wrecked and crumbling Raqqa.
