One of the castmembers of new Channel 4 show The Experiment has stated that it was one of the “most difficult roles” she has ever undertaken.
Ellie Wallwock warned her followers that the controversial new show would be a “hard-hitting watch” for many but “an important one as well”.
The Experiment is hosted by actor Mat Fraser and disability rights activist Sophie Morgan, and explores whether people could be “persuaded by ideas drawn from Nazi ideology” if they were presented as progressive solutions to a modern social “problem”.
In the documentary, members of the public are invited to tour the fake residential home SegriLife House, believing it to be a real facility that offers “a radical model of supported living”.
Disabled and neurodivergent actors play the residents subjected to the fake residential home’s messaging and policies.
The touring public have no idea that SegriLife’s protocols are in fact based on how the Nazi regime treated disabled people in 1930s and 1940s Germany.
“I am so proud to say that tomorrow night, at 10 PM on Channel 4, I will be featured in a groundbreaking documentary called The Experiment,” Wallwock, who is blind, wrote in an Instagram post before the show aired.
“This will be a hard-hitting watch for so many of you, but an important one as well.”
She continued: “This is one of the most difficult roles I’ve ever had, but for all of the challenges we faced, it reminded me of the importance of Disabled stories. It is powerful and emotional, but I hope it makes you take note of what happened and could happen to so many Disabled people in the past, present and future.”
Thanking her agent, co-stars and the show’s crew, Wallwock said it had been “an honour” to take part.
“Drawing on Nazi propaganda and the real ideas and language used to justify the systematic segregation, forced sterilisation and extermination of disabled people in Nazi-era Germany, The Experiment explores how such dangerous ideas can be repackaged and made to appear acceptable,” Channel 4 said ahead of the documentary, which aired on Wednesday 21 October.
The show has received hugely mixed reviews from critics, who were divided on whether the project was too manipulative, or whether it was a bold expose of how society views disabled people.
In a two-star review for The Independent, Nick Hilton wrote that The Experiment is designed to test the theory that modern Britain is “dangerously dehumanising disabled people”.
“It draws a stark parallel with the trajectory of Nazi Germany and intends to offer a warning about our susceptibility to eugenicist rhetoric,” he wrote.
“But, to do that, it engages in quite a tawdry display of tricking the public, setting them up to look stupid or heartless, but not interrogating the belief systems or experiences that brought them there.”
He also criticised that just 14 members of the public were invited to tour the “home”, complaining that this wasn’t enough to draw “any real conclusions”.
“It also gives a frustratingly vapid and prejudicial view of the Assisted Dying Bill, which is an important piece of legislation, whether you support or oppose it,” he said. “But Fraser and Morgan, alongside the show’s director, Richard Butchins, are clearly hugely passionate about this issue and are trying to tell a complicated story, in a grabby, thought-provoking way.”
The show wasn’t the “distasteful mess” that viewers and critics might have feared, he concluded, but was a show that “feels too convoluted and manipulative to be truly impactful”.
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