TV scheduling — a tool for public health?

Rob Atenstaedt

doi:10.3399/bjgp10X509676

Good quality sleep of adequate duration is recognised as vital in maintaining both physical and psychological health. According to Alvarez and Ayas,1 a variety of studies have suggested an association between self-reported sleep duration and health. Those patients who report both a reduced (<7 hours/day) or an increased (>8hours/day) sleep duration are at a modestly increased risk of all-cause mortality, coronary heart disease, and diabetes mellitus.

Research conducted by the Sleep Research Centre at Loughborough University, found that the most common time that adults in the UK fell asleep and woke up was 23:30 and 07:00 respectively, with an average sleep duration of 6.9 hours for men and 7.2 hours for women.2

There are a variety of documented factors that impact on the length and quality of sleep including stress, some medical conditions, certain medications, what people eat and drink, and their ‘sleep environment’.3 Another important factor is the increased time spent watching television.1 People in the UK spend an average of 3.6 hours per day watching TV, the majority of which is in the evening.4

I would like to argue that an overlooked factor that may affect the duration of sleep is TV scheduling. To look at how this could potentially affect sleep length, I decided to focus on the scheduling of movies that are some of the most popular programmes on TV.5

To this end, I obtained back issues of the Radio Times covering 1 month's viewing (30 January 2010–26 February 2010). I analysed the end time of all weekday (Sunday–Thursday) films that began between 18:30 and 23:30 (peak viewing times) and were listed in the film review section of this magazine. The results are shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1

Graph of frequency of end time of weekday movies.

It can be seen from the graph that the distribution is heavily skewed towards films that end after midnight. If the average individual, who wakes up at 07:00 to go to work, had wanted to watch more than almost two-thirds of these movies (44/72), then it is very likely that they wouldn't be falling asleep until after midnight, meaning that they would get fewer than 7 hours sleep. If this was repeated on a regular basis, it could potentially harm their health in the long term. Is it, perhaps, time that the TV executives started to consider public health when they schedule programmes such as movies?