Almost 15 years ago, 10 young people were tortured in an abandoned shopping centre in east London on live TV. They were contestants on the reality show Shattered, competing to stay awake as long as possible in order to win a £100,000 cash prize. After 178 hours of sleep deprivation, Clare Southern (now Clare Farah), a 19-year-old police cadet nicknamed “the Terminator”, scooped a £97,000 prize pot. (It had originally stood at £100,000, but deductions were made every time contestants fell asleep.)

Viewers complained to Ofcom about the show’s premise and the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy described the show as “misconceived and dangerous”, pointing out that American DJ Peter Tripp had a breakdown after he stayed awake for a world record 201 hours in 1959.

For ethical reasons, Shattered would probably never get made today. This is undoubtedly a good thing, not just for potential contestants, but also for viewers: I watched all seven episodes (they are on YouTube) and learned that watching people struggle to stay awake is not particularly gripping. Mostly, contestants sat around yawning.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Peter Tripp during his sleep-deprivation marathon. Photograph: Bettmann Archive

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). “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.

“I always felt like reality TV should have a purpose,” says Shattered producer Phil Edgar-Jones, who has also worked on Big Brother. “We didn’t just want it to be a forum for showoffs. 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’.”

Watching Shattered now, one is struck by how much quieter things were back in 2004. Facebook hadn’t launched yet; Twitter, Instagram and the iPhone were years away. 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. 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.

The show did provide insights into the science of sleep: what total sleep deprivation feels like, for example. The show’s runner-up, Chris Wandel, compares it to “being at a party. It dovetails with being drunk. 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 producers set contestants daily “you snooze, you lose” tasks between 2am and 4am, when the body most craves sleep. 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. If they fell asleep, the prize pot would drop. “We tried to introduce the most boring things you could possibly imagine,” says Edgar-Jones. Particular care was taken when casting the “grandmother”. “We went through quite a few to get the right level of comforting voice.”

For the bulk of the show, the contestants appeared remarkably upbeat. “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. Your state of mind dramatically affects your ability to endure sleep loss, he says. “If there’s a bit of fun and purpose to it, you’ll cope better.” He’s right. Farah, the show’s eventual victor, had the demeanour of a children’s TV presenter on MDMA. “She was superhuman,” says Edgar-Jones. “I remember us saying: ‘We should phone the SAS about her.’ She had steel somewhere in her spine.”

Farah was so accomplished at staying awake that producers had to order her to sleep during Shattered’s final challenge. She, Wandel and fellow finalist Jonathan Wood were all sent to bed, with the last person to fall asleep winning. Wandel and Wood both fell asleep within 15 minutes; Farah stayed awake for nearly two hours, until producers intervened.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The infamous ‘sleep-off.’ Photograph: YouTube/Channel 4

I unearth some unexpected intrigue: Wandel believes he was robbed. “Clare invented the idea of giving herself foot cramp to stay up and that proved to be a very successful strategy in the house,” Wandel says, claiming that she would stretch out her big toe as far as possible until it began to cramp, using the pain to help her to stay awake. He also alleges that Farah won because she didn’t use the toilet when she was told to do so by producers before the final sleep-off challenge, while he and Wood both did. (He says these tactics were against the rules.) “She forced herself to have a full bladder and found a way to commit pain to herself, and they [the producers] swept it under the carpet.”

Farah dismisses Wandel’s claims with a tinkly laugh. “I’ve never been a fan of the media,” she says. “They have a habit of manipulating weird conversations to make it look like you’re doing something else.” The foot cramp? A misrepresentation of a comment Farah made about using cramp to stay awake. And the full bladder? It wasn’t intentional. Farah drank “loads” of water in the house, in part because she had undiagnosed endometriosis. “I would have died of embarrassment if I’d wet myself on TV!”

Unexpectedly, Farah breaks from her pep-rally persona to say that if she had given herself foot cramp, that wouldn’t necessarily have been cheating. “If I’m honest, even if I were to cramp, even if any of the other people were to do that … if they did want to do that to win, I guess that’s their discretion and I wouldn’t say that’s necessarily cheating.” Edgar-Jones backs up her account. “I think it [the final] was fair.” Even if Farah did give herself foot cramp? “That doesn’t sound like cheating. I don’t know if she did do it, but that sounds like strategy to me.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Clare Southern, AKA ‘the Terminator’, during the show in 2004. Photograph: YouTube/Channel 4

Intrigue aside, none of the contestants suffered significant health consequences. Farah gained six pounds and Wandel felt jetlagged for a few days. Of course, they were tired. “My folks took me home and I was eating soup at the time and I stopped mid-sentence and I’d fallen asleep,” Farah remembers. “My head was on the table and the soup was everywhere.” After that though, “everything went back to normal”.

How do we explain the lack of long-term health problems? Participants weren’t awake the whole time, but given intermittent naps (the precise amount of time they were allowed is muddy). “They got 45 minutes of sleep every so often,” Edgar-Jones says. It was after one of these naps that Shattered had its most entertaining moment. Wandel “had a huge hallucination”, he says, “and I totally lost the plot. I thought I was the prime minister of Australia.” Although hallucinations are a known side-effect of sleep loss, Edgar-Jones is sceptical. “I suspected he was making it up.”

Sleep deprivation is a widely recognised form of torture, but none of the contestants I interview feel they were mistreated. This may be largely due to the ethics board that the production company, Endemol, employed. They vetoed producers’ more extreme ideas: using electric shocks to keep participants awake, for instance. “We had a session with a psychiatrist every 24 hours and a health check with a doctor every morning,” another contestant, Claire Muscat, says. “I think they were responsible.”

The naps and medical care may have stopped Shattered tipping over into unethical territory, but there is no doubt prolonged sleep loss damages your health. “Your ability to make rational decisions fails and you become impulsive,” says Prof Russell Foster of the University of Oxford. “You lack empathy and your social interactions will also be compromised.” After a week of no sleep, “your hunger hormones will be up and your ability to process glucose can be impaired. If you are vulnerable to metabolic problems, sleep disruption is problematic.” Your immune system also becomes compromised; as your white blood cell count drops, Foster says, your ability to fight off infection diminishes by a quarter. Sleep deprivation is also known to worsen existing mental health conditions. “You’re more likely to become anxious and go into a depressive episode, and if you’re schizophrenic or bipolar, it can exacerbate that.” Research has even linked sleep deprivation with an elevated risk of Alzheimer’s disease: as we sleep, the brain clears out the toxic metabolic waste product beta amyloid, a protein fragment that destroys synapses and can clump into plaques that cause nerve calls to die. Losing even one night’s sleep results in elevated beta-amyloid levels in the brain.

Despite the dangers, Foster believes that as the candidates were young, healthy, informed of the risks and monitored during filming, Shattered “was probably a legitimate” tool to raise awareness about the dangers of sleep loss. Farah, the winner, doesn’t have any misgivings. “A lot of people have looked back and said: ‘That seems really messed up, to stay awake for that long.’ But not really. We knew what we were getting ourselves into and we knew we could leave at any point.”

Still, Horne – who consulted on the show – believes that Shattered’s noble ambitions were overstated. “It was gimmicky, really. It wasn’t a hard-science experiment.” And Dr Trisha Macnair, who was on Shattered’s ethics board, feels that opportunities to educate the public about sleep were missed. “At the time, I thought: ‘Great – anything that increases public knowledge of sleep …’” But when filming started, Macnair changed her view. “I began to think they had done it as a token, to invite us,” she says. “It was a bit of a box-ticking exercise.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Runner-up, Chris Wandel on the show. Photograph: YouTube/Channel 4

Edgar-Jones acknowledges Shattered wasn’t perfect. “There’s loads I would have done differently.” Still, he might get a do-over: he mentions a Shattered spin-off concept that “takes it on a step”, although he won’t disclose details.

Shattered differs from today’s high-concept reality TV shows in one profound way: none of the contestants wanted to be famous. For all of them, Shattered was simply an opportunity to change their lives financially. “It wasn’t about being on the telly,” says Muscat, who was then a broke mother of two small children.

In those early days of competitive reality TV, contestants weren’t trying to maximise their brand so they could hawk charcoal toothpaste on Instagram. “Participants were interested in how they could be themselves in a reality TV show, whereas nowadays, participants are hyperaware of how to present themselves,” says Hill. “I call it a ‘meta-me’.” This explains, in part, why Shattered is so boring. “Scripted reality trafficks in what we call ‘emotional economics’, and it’s very successful at that,” she says. “Whereas Shattered has a whole different arc. It’s a much quieter show.”

All of the contestants I interview are aghast at the recent evolution of the genre, and would never go on reality TV now. “Love Island and shows like that really freak me out,” says Farah. “Ethically, I think they’re terrible in comparison with Shattered.”

After filming finished, Shattered’s participants slipped back easily into anonymity. “Things didn’t last for as long back then,” Muscat says. “Things were normal within a week or two.” There was one change: none of them ever took sleep for granted again. “I love sleep,” agrees Wandel. “But it’s good to know you can go without it if you need to.”

Sometimes, when Farah is working from home, she’ll creep upstairs. “I hug my bed and tell it I’ll see it later,” she admits guiltily. “Everyone should have a great bed and get great sleep. It’s the most important thing ever.”

The NHS website has information about issues surrounding insomnia: nhs.uk/conditions/insomnia