The social experiment I couldn’t bare to see

LIFE STRIPPED BARE (Channel 4)

MY attic is full of things that “might come in useful one day.”

And even though that day might not have come for five, 10 or 15 years (or even more than 20 in the case of the Goblin Teasmade I rescued from my mum’s boot sale) I still can’t bring myself to throw any of it away. Seems I’m not alone. According to this new series, Britons have, on average, 1000 items or “stuff” in their homes, most of which is sitting in cupboards unused.

The idea was to take all of those items away from six volunteers so they could learn which of them were really essential to their lives.

So, into storage for three weeks, went their laptops, mobiles, cooking appliances and even their cars. Then they could which of them to get back, one a day at a time.

But what could have been an interesting social experiment had it been just household items took a turn for the unnecessarily titillating by asking them to give up their clothes as well.

Instead of finding out if people could live without Facebook (all the participants were aged 30 or under so this was a genuine challenge) we just got an eyeful of young people running around trying to cover their bits.

I was so disappointed at the inanity of the process, my mind began to drift off to thinking of items in my house I could do without. Too many more programmes like this and my TV will be top of the list.

Being a pragmatic scientist, I wasn’t expecting Brian Cox to bring forth thoughts of shape shifting in his new series

Forces Of Nature (BBC1).

But as he filled my head with all manner of information about hexagons and buttressed symmetrical circles, I began to shift uncomfortably in my seat at my complete lack of understanding of a single word he was saying.