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.
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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