I often think, when something new is delivered to our screens, of all the forces that have had to combine over the weeks, months, sometimes years to get it there. From the first stirrings in a dramatist’s mind or the first steps of a documentary maker nosing out a story, and on through the eternally mysterious journey of creation, their ideas are gradually forming until arriving, finally, at the last stage of fruition – the bureaucratic hoops through which all must jump. Commissioners to entice and enthuse, lawyers to please, notes to take in, paperwork to fill out, the long chain of decisionmakers to be appeased, satisfied and made comfortable, until finally the show is given a slot and aired to the masses.

This, at least, is what I presume happens. But then programmes such as The British Tribe Next Door turn up and suddenly all certainties are gone, exploded into nothingness by a series – not even a one-off – that sends a suburban British family to live next door to a group of indigenous people in the Namibian desert to see what cultural hijinks ensue. And it is happening here, on Channel 4, in essence a public service broadcaster, and now, in the year of our Lord 2019.

It is … exactly as it sounds. The suburban family are the Moffatts, the County Durhamites from Gogglebox, who are perfectly pleasant, inoffensive people distinguished mainly by their eldest daughter, Scarlett, who has both a sense of humour and the rare and charming ability to put her thoughts into TV-friendly words as she is having them. They are taken to Namibia – younger daughter Ava-Grace barely lifting her head from her phone no matter how many breathtaking herds of wildlife pass their jeep – to live for a month with the semi-nomadic Himba people in Otjeme. You might not have expected the programme makers to take the gimmickry this far, by building an exact replica of the Moffatt house there, but other than that there is nothing you would not have suspected.

The Himba women who visit the house are staggered, and possibly appalled, by the 20,000 Moffattian possessions it contains (“Why do you need so many things for one person?” one asks, gazing round Scarlett’s cushion-covered, shoe-stuffed bedroom), fascinated and seemingly envious of the dishwasher and washing machine and baffled by the amount of housework that matriarch Betty still finds to do. The men reckon termites will take the lot in a few months.

There are some truly fascinating moments that reveal (to the uninitiated in the ways of semi-nomadic tribes in the Namibian desert, among whom I count myself) unsuspected depths to the cultural chasm. The first women to visit the house are perturbed by the idea of having a second floor and then absolutely flummoxed by stairs – “Are we climbing? Will we fall?” – and intrigued by the hall mirror. “I thought there was someone on the other side. It’s like water on the wall.”

But it is not enough to justify a series. And even less so a series that – despite what I’m generously going to assume were best efforts in the other direction – fails to avoid putting the tribe in the service of providing teachable moments to the Moffatts – and Scarlett in particular. The reaction in the mirror becomes the story of Scarlett’s insecurities about her body, as does the tribespeople’s desire that she wear their traditional dress.

None of this is the Moffatts’ fault. Scarlett’s unfiltered responses serve her well (“I don’t want to offend them,” she says on her way back to the house after a failed attempt to explain why she is not happy about wearing the topless dress, “or make them think I don’t appreciate what they’ve done, because I do …”) but the makers have put them in what seems to me to be an implicitly racist format, working within a tradition that has historically not treated indigenous people well or respectfully, even if there is nothing overtly racist about this specific instance. At the very best, you could say it is a massively flawed premise executed as well as you could hope. At worst, you could say very, very differently. But apparently nobody, at any point in that long, long line of folk responsible between concept and fruition, did.