Go Back to Where You Came From (Channel 4) | channel4.com
Mussolini: Son of the Century (Sky Atlantic/Now)
Miss Austen (BBC One) | iPlayer
Back in the mid-20th-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. That’s all gone out of academic fashion, but there is one laboratory where a version of it still thrives: Channel 4.
Go Back to Where You Came From is the latest example of the kind of artificially constructed reality TV that doesn’t feature unknown celebrities. 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.
A note after the credits reassured us that “24/7 security was in place throughout filming”. Was it to protect the participants from the threat of Islamic State and al-Shabaab or from each other? The introduction promised fireworks when Dave, a chef from Mansfield who claimed to represent the white working class and wants to see migrant-carrying boats bombed, observed of the asylum system: “It’s like rats. You leave food out, they’ll keep coming.”
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. Nathan, a large tattooed man who runs a haulage company and fears his children will be “going to work on a fucking camel”, and Jess, a lesbian sports coach from Wales – “I think the people coming over here are rapists and paedophiles” – flew to Mogadishu with Mathilda, a young journalist and podcaster who had worked with refugees and counted many as her friends.
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 13. Mathilda didn’t discuss that possibility but cautioned against generalising.
In Syria, Bushra, a small business owner from Surrey, was happy to generalise, at least when it came to her fellow Britons. “There is a large portion in Britain who I just think are thick as shit,” she said, making clear her sympathies with refugees, her disgust for Islamophobia and how she valued human empathy. Yet it has emerged that she recently tweeted that European Jews – the survivors of the greatest genocide in history – are “the biggest charlatans on this planet. Bunch of lying scumbags.” And questioned “everything we’re told about Jewish history”.
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. But tears are an unreliable guide – Jess wept because she didn’t like the way the local people looked at her in Mogadishu.
There are two arguments heard about this kind of endeavour. One is that it’s just another version of white saviourism, although the people who say this tend to be most in favour of asylum, which could be seen as another example of white saviourism. After all, why does Norway take in more Somali refugees than the much closer and larger Saudi Arabia?
And the other position is that it’s better to air unpalatable opinions than let them fester in the dark. That may be true, but the debate on migration could do with moving on from the point-scoring mirror accusations of racism and wokeness that currently frame it, and begin to address the global inequalities and insecurities that drive it.
Mussolini: Son of the Century (Sky Atlantic/Now) is likely to attract a much smaller audience than Go Back to Where You Came From, which is a shame because they make for instructive companion pieces. The Somalia Governorate was part of the dictator’s short-lived Italian East Africa colony (which briefly included British Somaliland – the British empire’s fingerprints were light but lasting).
Atonement/Darkest Hour director Joe Wright’s strange, heavily stylised but theatrically compelling take on Il Duce’s rise and fall relies on Luca Marinelli’s virtuoso lead performance for most of its dramatic force. He struts through almost every scene, chin out, eyes bulging, furiously declaiming on the irrational lure of fascism: “Our only doctrine is action!”
“A time always comes when a lost populace turns to simple ideas,” he conspiratorially informs the camera.
There are, inevitably, many contemporary echoes, and it’s hard not to detect some notes of Donald Trump in Marinelli’s (far more eloquent) Mussolini speeches, especially when he extemporises on his own heroism. What’s obvious is that the Italian benefited from a popular weariness, bordering on contempt, for liberal democracy.
All it took was this disillusionment and his own egomaniacal lust for power to plunge Italy into a brutal fantasy that left it in ruins and Mussolini’s corpse hanging upside down in a suburban Milanese square. There must be a lesson for us somewhere in there.
Whereas there was little to take away from the week’s other costume drama, Miss Austen (BBC One), except that using old correspondence as a means of flashbacks is always a little tortuous. This adaptation of Gill Hornby’s novel has all the familiar Austen components – creepy clergyman, spiteful in-law, yearning young lovers – except sharp wit. But at least no one could possibly be offended, which is probably a major commissioning plus these days.
Star ratings (out of five)
Go Back to Where You Came From ★★★
Mussolini: Son of the Century ★★★★
Miss Austen ★★
What else I’m watching
The Balkans: Europe’s Forgotten Frontier
(BBC Two/iPlayer)
Part travelogue, part reportage, this documentary moves from deserted, ravaged villages to idyllic coastlines with disorientating haste. Tip for travellers and investors: mineral-rich Albania is about to go large.
No Direction Home
(iPlayer)
Martin Scorsese’s great 2005 two-part Bob Dylan documentary is essential viewing for anyone enthused by the terrific James Mangold biopic in cinemas now.
Harrods: The Rise & Fall of a British Institution
(Channel 5)
A weird amalgam of retail history with a portrait of an alleged serial rapist, not helped by contributors who sound more alarmed by Mohamed Al Fayed’s aesthetic tastes than his conduct.
