IT certainly caused plenty of controversy when it aired earlier this year, but Channel 4’s latest social experiment didn’t quite get enough viewers to warrant a second series.
Go Back to Where You Came From saw a group of six Brits with various views on immigration undertake the perilous journeys made by people from other countries desperate to live in the UK.
It felt like The Apprentice, right down to the wheelie suitcases the participants trundle along a Kent beach[/caption]
The four-parter was designed to inform their views on refugees who were often coming from war-torn countries.
But many of their standpoints – and some of their historic social media comments – got viewers hot under the collar.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough to keep them glued to their sets. The first episode had almost a million watching, but the last episode they’d lost over a third of their audience.
A TV insider said: “Of course, Channel 4 will maintain they only made this as a stand alone show but the scope to continue the show with another batch of Brits was obvious.
“If the ratings were higher then it might well have had a sequel but it didn’t seem to capture the viewers imagination, even if some of the contestants’ views did inspire a fiery response.”
The Sun exclusively revealed last July how Channel 4 was developing the show in a bid to explore one of the hottest topics in British society.
Based on a 2011 Australian show of the same name, it saw them travel from Somalian capital Mogadishu and Raqqa in Syria, eventually crossing the Channel on a small boat.
A spokeswoman for Channel 4 said: “Go Back to Where You Came From was commissioned as a single series of event television, and we are immensely proud of what it achieved in creating national conversation about a hugely important issue.
“Any allusions to this programme being ‘cancelled’ are entirely false.”
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Contestants sitting with a family in Raqqa, Syria[/caption]
