A Bad Night
Mike: I started things badly by getting drunk the night before the shoot. I finally got to bed at four in the morning. This was stupid, because I was meant to be starting at eight, and knew that it might be me that would be facing a sleep ban for the next few days. As the crew began 'rigging' the cameras before seven in the morning I only got three hours' sleep and started the programme with a terrible hangover. Bummer!

Zeron: My first day in the house got off to a bad start. I was visiting friends in Norwich and planned to arrive at the house about 1am, to climb into bed and wake up all fresh faced and wide-eyed. However on the late night drive back I had one of those micro-sleeps at the wheel of my car and mounted the side kerb on the motorway and wrote off two tyres and wheels! Here I am about to start a show about sleep deprivation and I'm stuck on the motorway with not much chance of making it to the house for the early morning filming. I had a spare but still needed another wheel. Nothing to do but call the AA and wait.

It made me realise how important sleep is and how dangerous it is to drive without enough sleep. The AA eventually arrived and transported me and my car home, where I phoned a taxi and eventually arrived in the house at 5:30 in the morning. I carried everything up to my room and climbed into bed just after 6am. After just an hour of sleep I was rudely awoken by the crew at 7am. So between Mike and me there was no choice: Mike had had more sleep (just!), so he was the one to do the deprivation.

0 hours: The Start
Mike: I take time = 0 as being seven o'clock on the first morning. I wake up with a hangover. I'm totally wasted. If it had been a normal day I would have had a pint of water and gone straight back to bed, but I have no chance. I've got a full day of filming ahead of me, and 60 hours without sleep to go. What a berk. After being awake for half an hour a hammer drill starts up next door. It doesn't help my headache, and will make filming difficult.

Zeron: Mike doesn't know it yet but I've got out of the challenge. We are ordered up to the edit suite (a small upstairs bedroom transformed into the video suite) where I hand Mike the challenge. Is he pleased? I doubt it, but it's hard to tell - he's too hung over for me to tell! And he's blaming the producer, Steve, for keeping him up till the late hours and making him drink too much. Big baby!

 Mike: At first I thought that the production crew were joking. An anal probe? No chance! My arse is for expelling stuff, not the other way round. Of course, they weren't joking and what particularly worried me - on several levels - is that there were no shortages of volunteers to put it in place. I decided to insert it myself, however. So, armed with some Vaseline and an innocent looking length of grey cable, I paid a visit to the loo. It wasn't painless, but after a bit of messing around seemed to be in place OK. To make sure I taped the emerging wire to my butt cheek and refrained from farting. The thing that really worried me was going to the toilet though because I would have to take out the probe and replace it with a new one each time.

So what was this all for? To monitor my core body temperature which, in theory, would go down as I got more tired. The temperature of our skin may change regularly, however, even in hot or cold weather our core body temperature always remains tightly regulated.

Zeron: Our fitness instructor arrives, Jackie Porgeous (although this does not feature in the final cut). Her purpose is to put Mike through a set of gruelling physical test to show how well his body copes at the start of the deprivation, to compared with how difficult he finds it at the end. I like this bit because I had to mirror Mike in all the exercises. I love working out and would be in my element. I even got to dazzle Mike, the camera crew and Jackie with some of my Whu Shu skills. Mike did well in this test but was still suffering from a hangover from his late night drinking session. His high alcohol blood content slowed him down more than anything else - Mike is an extremely fit guy!

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