Channel 4 has been hush-hush about The Experiment (Wednesday, 10pm), revealing only that the documentary will “open the door” to an “experimental new residential home”. What it turns out to be is a provocative reality documentary that draws a direct connection between the Nazis’ murderous dehumanising of disabled people in the 1930s and 1940s and the demonisation of people with disabilities in modern Britain as “benefits scroungers”.
So it’s strong stuff, and no punches are pulled by actor Mat Fraser and rights activist Sophie Morgan, both of whom have disabilities and see proposals in the UK to cut benefits paid to disabled people as the thin end of a very sinister wedge.
In the usual course, a Channel 4 documentary about social welfare cutbacks in the UK would be of little relevance to Irish viewers. But the question asked by The Experiment is whether the prejudices against disabled people that the Nazis tapped into still linger, and that is of course as pertinent in Ireland as anywhere else.
Fraser and Morgan travel to Austria, where they visit nightmarish Hartheim Castle, where disabled people were murdered by the Nazis – an immaculately preserved charnel house which understandably brings Fraser to tears.
Back in the UK, they recreate the essence of that building but soften the horrors by using modern corporate speak. The facility is called “Segrilife House”, and members of the public, unaware that the institution is a set and all the inmates actors – are invited along for a tour.
This is a horror show dressed as satire, the sort of thing that might have appeared on Chris Morris’s scorched-earth satire, The Day Today, in the 1990s. You do feel slightly for the punters as they are walked through the building and invited to interact with patients who are forced to perform menial tasks, sleep in prison-style dorms and are invited to consider the “benefits” of sterilisation and euthanasia.
Initially, the visitors nod and smile politely. The further it goes, the more overwrought some of them become, leading one man to compare the centre to a Hitler fever dream. Others go along with it and observe that the patients seem perfectly happy.
Before it became the home of Bake Off and endless variations of Location, Location, Location, Channel 4 had a reputation as the punk rock alternative to the BBC and ITV. It harks back to those early years with this barricade-rushing call to arms, which asks us to critique our own views toward disabled people. There is a limit to how far its warnings about the weaponisation of the benefits system against disabled people apply to Ireland, but even with that caveat, this is unflinching and provocative television.