IAN HYLAND on last night’s telly
Why Can’t We Sleep? ITV ★★★
When I saw the title of this, I thought ITV’s bosses might be indulging in a session of collective soul-searching.
And I was ready with a whole list of suggestions as to what could possibly be keeping them awake at night right now.
Sadly, it turned out to be another
bog-standard look at Britain’s sleeprelated health crisis.
“As a nation we’re exhausted,” said host Ranvir Singh, who perhaps has more reason than most.
Her day job as Political Editor of Good Morning Britain requires Ranvir to get up early AND listen to Piers Morgan for three hours.
There wasn’t much in this to keep her awake. In fact, when one expert
said, “We’re struggling as a society to switch off,” my first response was “wanna bet?”
Unlike the countless other sleep documentaries, this one had a distinct lack of footage of people doing strange things in spooky night vision.
The only decent clips were old ones of Rhianwen Gilmore, from South Wales.
Rhianwen suffers from night terrors in which she sees a “sinister tall man
dressed in Victorian clothing” at the bottom of her bed – which reminds me, we haven’t seen very much of Jacob ReesMogg lately.
Later, I totally empathised with poor Rhianwen when she revealed: “I can guarantee that four nights a week something is going to terrify me.”
Although, thanks to the BBC schedulers, for me that number did go down a bit when the Women’s World Cup was on.
‘‘
There was a distinct lack of footage of people doing strange things in spooky night vision