Last night Channel 4 broadcast The Event: How Racist Are You?, which replicated an exercise into racial awareness and discrimination by ex-schoolteacher Jane Elliott. Regardless of your opinion concerning Elliott’s techniques – and they are nothing if not controversial – the unfortunate truth remains that this programme, advertised and broadcast as a documentary, aimed to show how susceptible to bigotry the British public were by employing “everyday, off-the-street” volunteers in the exercise – which segregated people by their eye colour – but those said same volunteers were in fact actors drafted through entertainment agencies by the production company. Channel 4 have defended this by claiming that people with theatrical backgrounds were selected because “they can come across better” than average people; a despicable and, unfortunately, dominant belief amongst those who create much documentary or reality programming.

This deplorable activity features heavily in the creative processes behind progammes like The X-Factor – which doesn’t pick people off the street but instead offers TV exposure to known session singers or budding-stars-with-agents – and Big Brother, whose production teams are looking for the most shocking, outrageous, headline-grabbing behaviour available and would prefer to work with people already comfortable in the shallow, devious world of broadcast media. But it is totally incomprehensible to include actors in a documentary that aims to represent a microcosm of British perspective, without first admitting that some involved are employed in the entertainment industry and therefore their manner should be assessed accordingly. It is startlingly idiotic that the volunteers in such a programme should all be actors: the results are not indicative of anything but a cross-section of the acting fraternity, who are uniformly without inhibition and participate on a sycophantic, egotistical basis.

This decision to include actors effectively put the kibosh on the programme from the off, especially since elements were included which seem ludicrous given the actors’ involvement. Presenter Krishnan Guru-Murthy attempted to psychoanalyse the participants with two off-screen psychologists: what price the analysis of someone who is deliberately play-acting to a situation, be it to the conscious knowledge of the production team or not? Likewise, the ambitions of the actors taking part cannot be ruled out. The louder, more aggressive or showier members of the group could simply have been acting up for the cameras in a vain attempt to gain screen-time and exposure, rather than showing their true emotions or opinions. Channel 4’s explanation for the involvement of actors is hogwash, typical of the media professionals who do not understand, on the most basic level, the damage and manipulation they are party too consistently throughout their careers. A programme like this should have involved a randomly selected, disparate group of British citizens if it was to make the statements it aspired to, but the egotistical attitudes and condescending practices of the mass audio-visual media refused any honesty in the programme, to Elliot and her theories, and to any understanding of our racist motivations by turning what was possibly a worthwhile experiment into a piece of entertaining fiction.

The clue was in the title: it had been called an “event”.