Contestants forced to stay awake for seven days straight to win huge cash prize in torturous reality show

For a contestant to win a hefty £100k, all they had to do was stay awake for seven straight days - just writing that made me yawn.

Back in 2004, the reality TV programme was commissioned by Channel 4 as 10 contestants aged between 19 and 33 would battle it out for the big prize.

But there was, of course, a catch.

Contestants would have to keep each other awake to avoid deductions to the prize fund.

In fact, if anyone closed their eyes for over ten seconds £1,000 would be deducted.

Below is a fresh faced Dermot O'Leary presenting the opening episode to Shattered:

Disclaimer: to ensure the safety of the contestants, they were allowed to sleep for just one hour per day.

Without this, the show could have been deemed too dangerous.

However, participants had no access to medicines, alcohol, drugs (thankfully), electronic equipment, mobile phones or musical instruments, during their stay.

And there was a series of challenges throughout the show which seriously tested the housemates' limits.

In the 'You Snooze You Lose' task it was designed to put contestants to sleep by being forced to cuddle soft toys, sit in a warm room and even to watch paint dry in a recliner chair.

I bet this made you yawn. (Channel 4)

Mad stuff.

Though the final challenge was a brutal sleep off.

The last person to nod off would win the cash prize and it was Clare Southern who outlasted the lot after a whopping 178 hours awake in total.

She walked away with a cool £97,000.

“There was an atmosphere of fun about the whole thing that was very important,” Prof Jim Horne, a sleep neuroscientist at the University of Loughborough, who was an adviser on the show, told The Guardian.

“If there’s a bit of fun and purpose to it, you’ll cope better.”

The show didn't make it past one season. (Channel 4)

Clare, the winner, said. “A lot of people have looked back and said: ‘That seems really messed up, to stay awake for that long.’

“But not really. We knew what we were getting ourselves into and we knew we could leave at any point.”

Dr Trisha Macnair, who was on Shattered’s ethics board, added: “It was gimmicky, really. It wasn’t a hard-science experiment.

“At the time, I thought: ‘Great – anything that increases public knowledge of sleep … I began to think they had done it as a token, to invite us.

“It was a bit of a box-ticking exercise.”

Although 34 complaints were made to Ofcom, they reportedly said none of its programme guidelines were breached.