Goodnight Britain - Review

Sunday 2nd December 2012

 

After being the victim of a night-time assault in second year by a housemate who revealed his sleepwalking habit by appearing in my room and throwing his toiletries bag at me, Goodnight Britain looked to me to be a timely insight into unusual sleeping habits.

According to the documentary, my housemate is one of half a million Britons who suffer from parasomnia, the technical term for sleep-walking, talking, and in the case of one woman featured on the programme, screaming and running about in the belief that you are being assaulted. I sympathised with her frazzled housemate.

Goodnight Britain also tackled sufferers with common problem sleep behaviours such as snoring and insomnia. The first step involved going all Carrie Mathison on the sleep sufferers and rigging their homes with night vision cameras, which were closely monitored by two sleep experts (who weirdly never seemed to need sleep) in their ‘sleep mobile’, where they proceeded to make borderline creepy observations such as “she looks like a good sleeper.”

To begin with it was hard not to see the funny side of the unusual night time activity; I have a friend who talks in her sleep and once hosted an imaginary dinner party where she offered me cheese canapés. In such cases, it’s easy to regard parasomnia as pretty harmless. However the show soon highlighted the serious side of dodgy sleeping, as one participant was suspended from his job as a van driver due to his suffering from obstructive sleep apnoea, a terrifying condition which meant he stopped breathing in between snores.

The insights into the science behind a good night’s sleep were fascinating, but stretched out to two hour long episodes things became increasingly tedious. In the first episode we watched the sufferers in their homes, before watching them again in a special ‘sleep house’, which felt like a particularly dull episode of Big Brother. It wasn’t until the second episode that they actually underwent treatment, a repetitive affair of analysing each night’s sleep, until the interesting tips about “sleep hygiene” and how to treat insomnia were buried under all the content. Condensed into one hour we could have avoided all the unnecessary attempts to inject drama with the most clichéd TV terms available – apparently treating the various conditions would mean “pushing sleepers to their limit”. Sometimes it’s better to just admit that you can’t wring that much drama out of watching someone try and sleep with a mouth guard in.

Nevertheless it was great to see the participants overcome the night behaviours that tormented them, and to see snorers returning from their banishment to the sofa. As for sleep walkers, apparently the solution is to rig their doors with alarms so they can’t get out of their bedrooms – I’ll definitely be trying that one out.