7/1/2023 0 Comments Dont sleep cast![]() I unearth some unexpected intrigue: Wandel believes he was robbed. The infamous ‘sleep-off.’ Photograph: YouTube/Channel 4 Wandel and Wood both fell asleep within 15 minutes Farah stayed awake for nearly two hours, until producers intervened. She, Wandel and fellow finalist Jonathan Wood were all sent to bed, with the last person to fall asleep winning. “I remember us saying: ‘We should phone the SAS about her.’ She had steel somewhere in her spine.”įarah was so accomplished at staying awake that producers had to order her to sleep during Shattered’s final challenge. Farah, the show’s eventual victor, had the demeanour of a children’s TV presenter on MDMA. “If there’s a bit of fun and purpose to it, you’ll cope better.” He’s right. Your state of mind dramatically affects your ability to endure sleep loss, he says. “There was an atmosphere of fun about the whole thing that was very important,” says Prof Jim Horne, a sleep neuroscientist at the University of Loughborough, who was an adviser on the show. “We went through quite a few to get the right level of comforting voice.”įor the bulk of the show, the contestants appeared remarkably upbeat. Particular care was taken when casting the “grandmother”. “We tried to introduce the most boring things you could possibly imagine,” says Edgar-Jones. If they fell asleep, the prize pot would drop. The challenges were entertainingly cruel: contestants were read bedtime stories by “grandmothers” in overheated rooms, made to cuddle teddy bears or sit in a comfy chair watching paint dry. The producers set contestants daily “you snooze, you lose” tasks between 2am and 4am, when the body most craves sleep. You know how sometimes when you’re drunk you’re having the best time ever and sometimes you can be an emotional wreck? It’s like that.” The show’s runner-up, Chris Wandel, compares it to “being at a party. The show did provide insights into the science of sleep: what total sleep deprivation feels like, for example. Regardless of what Shattered can teach us about sleep loss, it does afford us an insight into a simpler age when reality TV seemed pregnant with the possibility that it might teach us real-life lessons about social and health issues. As a result, Shattered has an innocence to it: contestants are disarmingly normal and without the snakelike cunning expected of today’s reality TV gladiators. Facebook hadn’t launched yet Twitter, Instagram and the iPhone were years away. Watching Shattered now, one is struck by how much quieter things were back in 2004. ![]() We wanted it to be a genuine experiment.” The producers, he says, “wanted to explore what it means to live in a hyperconnected world where technology meant we were constantly ‘on’.” “We didn’t just want it to be a forum for showoffs. “I always felt like reality TV should have a purpose,” says Shattered producer Phil Edgar-Jones, who has also worked on Big Brother. “They were connected to the early rhetoric around Big Brother, which was always about social observation,” says Prof Annette Hill of Lund University in Sweden. Shattered was at the forefront of a wave of “social experiment” shows in the early- to mid-00s that constructed themselves along pseudoscientific lines, alongside early Big Brother, Space Cadets (in which participants believed they were orbiting the Earth for five days, but were actually in a Suffolk studio) and There’s Something About Miriam (in which six men attempted to win the heart of a Mexican model, before being told she was transgender). ![]() Peter Tripp during his sleep-deprivation marathon. ![]()
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