The Great British Switch Off

We spend way over 3 hours a day watching it and it’s one of our favourite topics of conversation. Although we love TV and watch lots of it, sometimes we don’t know how much we value TV until it’s taken away.

We thought it would be interesting to find out exactly what happens when people can’t watch TV. Do they struggle or is it easy? Is it harder than they anticipated? How does it make them feel?

This is exactly what we tasked Antidote Productions to find out. They recruited a variety of six telly loving households from families, to couples to single households. Then, we told them that they couldn’t watch TV for a period of two weeks. They were filmed during the experiment and shared video diaries which were reviewed by practising clinical psychologists to analyse how they reacted.

You can see the results of this observational project by watching the film but here is a taster of reactions:

• “It’s like someone has sucked the energy out of the house”
• “This is just torture”
• “It makes you feel segregated from the world”