Channel 4 documentaries have lost the plot again ...Middle East

A polite suggestion to Channel 4’s Factual department. There may be something fundamentally wrong with the premise of your documentary if you have to go all the way to war-ravaged Mogadishu before your cast are willing to regard displaced families as human beings.

If your presenter is sacrificing herself to an experiment so ill advised and exposing that she is reluctant to share it with any expert she speaks to. If your subject’s fragile relationship breaks down during filming of their IVF treatment and has, along with the home life with her existing five children, for years been the fodder for damaging tabloid scrutiny.   

What is going on at Channel 4? Because the misguided documentaries I have watched recently feel like relics from 20 years ago, when “outrage” and “shock” and “social experiments” triumphed over thoughtful discussion and debate, nuanced viewpoints and responsible, journalistic rigour. Can we get Dispatches to investigate – if it too has not already been compromised?

We’ll start with this week’s abysmal Go Back to Where You Came From, a new series whose title is tediously provocative and in which a handful of Britons who believe you should sink every boat in the Channel lest the UK become a Muslim country within 10 years, with a couple of bleeding hearts thrown in for good measure, head off on tour to Syria and Somalia to see the reality of what many asylum seekers are fleeing. And during which one woman, observing a child pulling scrap metal out of a skip in Raqqa, proposes that they probably got an “entrepreneurial kick out of it”.   

The indignities here range from surprise at the availability of Cornettos in Syria to the insertion of a bidet nozzle into the rectum. It is not an earnest attempt to reflect or challenge British points of view on the migrant crisis, but an excuse to broadcast bigoted tripe about refugees being paedophiles and rapists and piss off everybody who watches it, whether they agree or not.

If you need to take someone to the most dangerous place in the world to remind them of their humanity, they’re probably not the kind of person worth putting on TV. Especially if, rather than meaningfully engage with the conditions and politics that have led to greater support for the far right, all you really want is for your audience to sneer at them.   

Which brings me to Vicky Pattison. The former Geordie Shore star and Queen of the Jungle is intelligent, charismatic, curious and a personable broadcaster – I like her and think she’s earnt her post-reality-show television career.

But My Deepfake Sex Tape, in which she enlisted adult actors to create a sex tape that would then have her likeness imposed onto it using AI, and which she then uploaded onto the internet, was a misfire.

It was a bold conceit, and succeeded in demonstrating the grim, pervasive sophistication of the technology being used to violate women in this way. But her involvement didn’t feel essential so much as foolish.  

She spoke, thoughtfully, to victims and campaigners, but while she was horrified and upset upon seeing the images AI could create, the exercise could not hope to really explore the life-destroying impact of this crime – because she did it to herself.

The most sobering moment of the film had nothing to do with her sex tape and came when she discovered men were uploading images of themselves ejaculating over pictures of her. Yes, being famous – being a woman – leaves you vulnerable to depraved objectification, but she did not need to immerse herself to prove it, and Channel 4 did not need to endorse it.

Katie Price: Making Babies might be the most infuriating of all. I really like Price. I always have. I don’t think you could watch her on television and not feel charmed, a bit protective, a bit concerned about her, and so a series following the then-45-year-old as she tries to conceive more children, which she states many times are what give her life meaning, with a man (boyfriend Carl Woods) she is certain will leave her if she can’t, completely lets her down.  

Why I only want to watch TV about terrible people

Rather than explore the topic of fertility, especially for women in their forties, or invite viewers to empathise, it encourages them to dismiss her for ignoring advice and trying to get pregnant again for the wrong reasons and seems deliberately confected to anger people struggling to conceive or who cannot afford IVF themselves. There is no question that she is a devoted mother, but this should not have been broadcast.

I’m not Mary Whitehouse. I’ve watched all sorts of bad taste, seedy, possibly ethically dodgy TV with gimmicks that trivialise very sensitive or pressing subjects – much of it on Channel 4. But there’s a difference between unorthodox and exploitative, and that distinction lies in what the audience is supposed to feel while watching.

If that, sincerely, is intrigued, challenged, surprised, and as if our assumptions have been overturned, then risky gambits are worth it. If we are being made to feel contempt, judgement, disdain or snobbery toward the participants then it isn’t just them being exploited – it’s us, too.

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