Scrabb said: 'Yes I do. The show likes dissent. Politicians and celebrities are quite often criticised and mocked, sometimes in fairly crude working-class language. Trump is the favourite target for abuse, though not the only one [...] it would have been refreshing, and the producers would have seized on it, had one of the participants said we were to blame for starting the war and gave reasons for it.' - Yeah, I can't see it ever happening. Some topics are just too sensitive to the PTB to pass through the filters. When Farage (of all people) said that NATO provoked the war the condemnation and accusations of treachery were wall-to-wall in the msm, so I think producers would feel very nervous about attracting that kind of attention, even if was good for ratings.

I don't watch much TV any more, but I do keep an eye out for comedy/entertainment programmes that bill themselves as edgy or politically controversial. They all come across as highly managed, blustering hard about certain topics and raging against the individual politicians who they're allowed to rage against, but incredibly sensitive about other subjects, either ignoring them completely or tiptoeing around them so carefully that you can't even understand the point they're trying to make.

The fact that none of the Gogglebox participants strayed outside the bounds to me indicates that this is one of those 'third rail' issues where dissent is completely unacceptable, to the point of being unthinkable.

cheers,
I