It has been 20 years since Brass Eye first appeared, but the spirit of the satirical news show lives on in My Week As a Muslim (Channel 4), a documentary so spectacularly odd in every respect that it’s hard to believe it wasn’t conceived as a dare. It follows Katie Freeman, 42, ex-RAF, who now works as a healthcare assistant in the NHS. Katie lives in Winsford, Cheshire, and is frightened of Muslims. She explains her belief that people are coming to this country and stretching its resources. The voiceover notes, with withering timing, that she lives in one of the whitest areas of Britain and rarely mixes with anyone outside of her own ethnicity.

In order to challenge her prejudices, such as avoiding sitting next to women in headscarves because she’s scared they’re about to blow something up, the producers make Katie spend the week in Manchester, talking to some real-life Muslims. But what is this, a radio documentary? This is TV, so for that visual point of view, that hashtag talking point, she goes full immersive, like Wife Swap meets Undercover Boss meets Snog Marry Avoid meets the bits of Little Britain that everyone has decided were a bad idea. Katie is turned into a British Pakistani Muslim, with prosthetics, a hijab and enough foundation to sink an ITV2 reality star. That way, the thinking seems to be, she – and crucially, insultingly, the viewers – will really learn what life is like for Muslims in the UK today.

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The patience of Saima Alvi, Katie’s host for the “experience”, is seemingly endless, and you can see why she might want to use a TV show such as this as a platform to challenge the simple misconceptions and racist views that seem increasingly commonplace. “I genuinely saw in Katie, she’s just not had that experience …” she says, with clear-eyed comprehension. “All you’re going to be left with is assumptions.” There are moments of compassion such as this that transcend the tawdry package in which they’re presented; moments of understanding on both sides that are funny because they’re so daft, such as a discussion about wolf whistles and whether they’re nice or not.

Then Manchester Arena is attacked and 22 people are killed. It happens in the middle of filming. The fear shifts, transparently, from Katie to Saima. It allows Katie to hear additional tales of prejudice that she might not have heard – a woman in a niqab tells her she had to walk on a treadmill because her son told her not to go outside that day; another woman says her kids are not to take public transport. You can’t help but wonder if wringing out the same planned format, in such dramatically changed circumstances, makes it even more queasy. The subsequent lurches in tone, from amusement to horror, are desperately hard to balance.

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Despite the efforts of those on camera to make it serve a better purpose, My Week As a Muslim is too cynical a concept for that to happen. I couldn’t shake the feeling that Katie already knew her opinions were ill-informed and flimsy, which is why she seeks an explanation of “why they live like that”, as she puts it. She isn’t going to Saima’s house to challenge her on the tenets of Islam. She’s going because she’s aware that she’s afraid and doesn’t understand what she’s afraid of. Any bravado is paper-thin, and when she meets people who are not like her, of course, it dissolves into nothing. Her mother, Joyce, is so scared of the hijab that she cries when she sees her daughter wearing one; within minutes of discussing it, she realises she’s ashamed of her beliefs. These women are not Tommy Robinson. “We’re all just the same, aren’t we?” says Katie at one point, adding variations on that realisation throughout the hour.

But are we really reduced to needing such a feeble and simplistic premise to understand racism in the UK? There are easy, surface moments of hope here, for Katie at least, and she forms a lasting friendship with Saima, so we’re told. But how is it possible that, according to this programme, we have to have a white person in “brownface” getting shouted at outside a pub in order to reach some understanding of the fact that racism is a disgrace? Why is it not enough to have Saima and her friends talking about their experiences? Why not just listen to them, instead of pursuing the bleak notion that viewers need it filtered through Katie to truly get it? “This is the only way I could learn,” says Katie, gravely, at the end. If that really is true, for her and for the audience, then we have a long, long way to go.