Mat Fraser leads the Channel 4 experiment airing tonight, with The Experiment asking whether members of the British public will accept Nazi-inspired treatment of disabled people when it is packaged as progressive care. The documentary puts that test in front of viewers through SegriLife House, where the premises look like supported living and the methods do not.
Mat Fraser and Sophie Morgan
Fraser hosts the programme with Sophie Morgan, and the pair say they wanted to test whether the British public could be persuaded by similar propaganda today. Their joint statement is blunt: “It was important for us to finally bring the catastrophic history of Aktion T4 and the Nazis’ persecution of disabled people to our television screens, but more importantly we wanted to test whether the British public could be persuaded by similar propaganda today – to believe that disabled people are disposable, or less deserving of a place in society”.
They add that “the chances of repeating the past are far higher than we think”. That line gives the documentary its businesslike edge: it is not being sold as period history, but as a live test of how easily old ideas can be repackaged for a modern audience.
SegriLife House and residents
Members of the public tour SegriLife House believing it to be a real facility, while disabled and neurodivergent actors play the residents. The house is presented as offering a radical model of supported living, which is exactly the point of friction in the format: the pitch sounds progressive, while the rules behind it are based on the Nazi regime’s treatment of disabled people in 1930s and 1940s Germany.
Channel 4 says the documentary explores how dangerous ideas can be repackaged and made to appear acceptable. It also says the programme draws 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, so the experiment is built around language as much as policy.
Hartheim Castle and Museum
Fraser and Morgan also visit Hartheim Castle and Museum in Austria, described in the programme as a former Nazi killing centre. The documentary receives guidance from Access All Areas and the Graeae Theatre Company during filming, and that matters because the production is not just staging a provocation; it is trying to manage a very specific history while putting it on television screens.
For viewers, the sharpest question is not whether the setup is extreme. It is how ordinary reactions are shaped when the same ideas are dressed up as care, and whether the responses filmed inside SegriLife House say more about the people touring it or the language surrounding them.
