Channel 4's new social experiment, The Experiment, sees members of the public tour a fake residential home for disabled people that is riddled with Nazi ideology, with most participants failing to speak out against the dehumanising concepts presented to them.
Presenters Mat Fraser and Sophie Morgan set out to discover how susceptible the British public are to Nazi ideology about disabled people, against a backdrop of growing anti-benefits and ableist rhetoric. The pair fear the disabled community globally are once again being framed as a financial burden.
The Segrilife tour
The programme features "Segrilife", a residential home for disabled people that members of the public are invited to tour. Every resident is a disabled actor, and the corporate films and posters are made using AI. Fraser and Morgan watch events unfold on monitors in another room.
Each part of the tour is based on a different piece of Nazi ideology. The group is shown "the workshop", where disabled people place beads on string to earn an allowance. A character called Sonia, threading monotonously in her wheelchair, says: "I used to be in marketing. I don't know why I'm in this room now."
The tour also includes a dormitory called "the nest", a room with threadbare beds lined up in a row for disabled people to use as a communal bedroom, with cameras placed on the walls to monitor them. One woman in the tour group says approvingly: "It's safe. That's what the people we've just met need."
Harrowing history
On the walls are posters repackaging 1930s fascist concepts with a glossy contemporary face, showing the price tag of a disabled person's care package in bold font next to their smiling photo, with mantras such as: "Normal life isn't for everyone."
Threaded between these scenes is a harrowing history of "Aktion T4" – the Nazi programme to systematically segregate and murder disabled people. Fraser, visibly distressed, and Morgan visit Hartheim Castle in Austria, one of six facilities in which tens of thousands of so-called "mercy killings" of disabled people occurred in gas chambers from 1939.
Disturbing reactions
Few TV moments this year have been more disturbing than when three members of the public and a manager (an actor) discuss the "cost" of a young disabled woman as she sits silently in the same room, with the "savings" the state has made by putting her in an institution glowing on an iPad.
Viewers wait desperately for someone to speak up, and it is a long wait. There are a couple of women who show some concern, but it's all rather tame given what they're seeing. By the time one man on the tour finally declares, "This is hell on earth," the tension is almost unbearable.
There is a standard reassuring reveal at the end of the programme, in which the participants discover the truth and make all the right noises to suggest they have learned something. But most of the public who take part are convinced it is quite rational to treat disabled people as less than human, and with remarkable ease.
Some excuse it for the strain on the taxpayer. Others say institutionalisation is for disabled people's own sake. As one woman concludes, it's "incredible" they are being looked after and "kept occupied".
There is a moment when Morgan covers her eyes with her open fingers, barely able to watch through the monitors what has been unleashed. Acknowledging that these attitudes still exist is the only way society might begin to rid itself of them. The Experiment is on Channel 4 now.
