A television host spins the wheel while another looks on. The two presenters of a popular daytime show in the UK have run this feature many times before. They call viewers and offer them the chance to win prizes through a lottery draw. Prizes usually include cash awards, split into portions of the wheel that, once spun, can be landed on. On 5 September 2022, there was a difference. These options, labelled onto glittering gold and brightblue segments of the wheel, are ‘£1,000’ and ‘Energy Bills’. A reward at stake is the payment of £400 towards a viewer's energy bills, each month for four months. To select who plays, the presenters call viewers one by one, without warning and require those called to answer with a passphrase. Most days, this leads to a few false starts as viewers miss the call or fail to give the correct password. The first viewer called on this show has just got back from visiting their 93-year-old great aunt. He answers the phone with the set phrase immediately. The two presenters introduce the game and prizes, asking the caller: “How are your energy bills? Are you worried about it at all?” The viewer answers that they are reliant on a pre-payment meter, where users pay for energy before using it, and that they have major concerns about paying their bills into the winter. The wheel spins. It lands on ‘Energy Bills’. The sound of the viewer's relief is heard down the phone line and across the studio.

This segment on national television represented the turning of many people's anxieties over spiralling energy bills into a gameshow format. Warmth is treated as a prize, like a new car or a holiday. Electricity as a reward to be won, rather than a right or human need. The competition was soon labelled as dystopian and tone-deaf in a context of a widening energy price crisis in the UK in 2022 (Salisbury, 2022). The game appeared on the daytime show for the following few days with ‘Energy Bills’ still offered as a prize. However, it was quietly removed within the week. When it returned to the show a month later, the prizes offered were cash awards only.

Competitions to win warmth and light are signals of the failure of how we currently manage energy.