Gladiators Was Cancelled. Our Eyes Never Recovered. 

Jack Hooper asks whether we still have the speed, the strength, the heart – and the eyesight – to be a winner in the modern world, with help from Gladiators and vision science. 

Isn’t it irritating when your parents turn out to have been right? 
Not morally – that would be unbearable – but biologically. 

Remember those Saturday nights glued to the telly, watching the greatest TV programme ever: Gladiators. A 1990s British cultural phenomenon involving adults named after predatory animals, an epic theme song, and gratuitous amounts of muscle and Lycra. If this means nothing to you, pause here, load up YouTube, and only return once you’ve completed the necessary cultural education. 

You’d edge closer to the screen, desperate not to miss a contender – likely some poor bank manager from Huddersfield – take a pugil stick to the face from a spandex-clad goliath, only to hear the warning from your parents that sitting too close to the TV would give you square eyes. 

It’s their fault really: you wouldn’t have to sit so close if they’d just bought you  tickets to watch them live. 

But, unfortunately, they were right. 

Well, sort of. Eyes do not, as far as anyone has ever observed, turn square. They don’t slowly acquire corners or hard edges in response to excessive exposure to foam fingers and unitards. 

But they do change shape, and in a way that modern science is increasingly concerned about. 

Eyes do not,  
as far as anyone has ever observed, 
turn square. 

Myopia, or short-sightedness, occurs when the eyeball grows too long from front to back. This elongation shifts the point at which incoming light is focused so that images of distant objects form in front of the retina rather than directly on it. The result is familiar to anyone who has ever squinted at a bus number in the rain: nearby objects remain clear, while the distance dissolves into blur. 

In its mildest form, myopia is little more than an inconvenience. Glasses or contact lenses usually correct the problem perfectly well. But when myopia becomes more severe, it stops being merely optical and starts to become medical. Excessive elongation stretches the retina and other delicate structures at the back of the eye, increasing the risk of retinal detachment, glaucoma, and myopic maculopathy – conditions that can lead to permanent and sometimes profound vision loss. 

This matters because myopia is no longer rare. Its prevalence is increasing so rapidly that many researchers now describe it as a global pandemic. Current projections suggest that by 2050, nearly half of the world’s population may be short-sighted, with particularly high rates in children and young adults. 

The speed of this rise is crucial. Human genetics have not changed appreciably over a few decades, which strongly suggests that environmental factors are driving the trend. One of the most obvious candidates is the way we now use our eyes. 

A recent large-scale meta-analysis, drawing on data from 45 studies and more than 335,000 participants, found a clear dose–response relationship between screen time and myopia. Each additional hour of daily screen use was associated with a 21% increased risk of developing short-sightedness. In children who already had myopia, every extra hour was associated with a 54% increase in the risk of progression. These are not subtle effects. They point to something about modern visual habits that is reshaping eyes at a population level. 

The risk of myopia appears to be highest when screen time replaces time spent outdoors. This distinction matters. It isn’t simply that screens are bad, but that they so often displace something quietly protective. One large school-based study in Taiwan found that increasing outdoor time significantly reduced the onset of myopia in children, reversing a long-term trend of declining visual acuity. Similar effects have been observed elsewhere, including in Australia and China, where more time outdoors consistently lowers the risk of progression in children who are already short-sighted. 

This consistency across very different populations is striking, and hard to dismiss. It suggests that whatever is happening is not cultural, educational, or even technological in any narrow sense, but biological. Something about being outdoors – regardless of whether children are climbing trees, kicking footballs, or simply loitering with no obvious purpose – seems to matter. 

From an evolutionary perspective, this makes a great deal of sense. The human visual system evolved for scanning distant horizons, tracking movement, responding to changes in light and distance, and generally coping with a world that was not three inches away. It did not evolve for hours of sustained close-up focus on glowing rectangles held directly in front of your face. Near work activities – reading, writing, scrolling – place continuous demands on the eye’s focusing system and can encourage elongation of the eyeball. But near work alone doesn’t fully explain the effect. The absence of daylight appears to be just as important. Perhaps more so. 

Sunlight plays a direct role in regulating eye growth. Bright outdoor light stimulates the release of dopamine in the retina, a signalling molecule that acts as a brake on excessive elongation of the eyeball. When dopamine signalling is reduced, as it tends to be indoors, under comparatively dim artificial lighting, that braking effect is weakened. The eye becomes more likely to grow longer in response to prolonged close focus. 

This helps explain why outdoor time is so effective even when children continue to do large amounts of near work. Spending as little as two hours a day outside has been shown to significantly reduce the risk of developing myopia, likely because it restores this dopamine-mediated protective mechanism. Crucially, this is something artificial lighting cannot fully replicate. A classroom may feel bright, but to the retina it is a murmur compared with daylight. 

Taken together, the modern pattern of childhood begins to look like an unfortunate experiment: conducted at scale, without controls, and with remarkably little discussion of the outcome. We have created environments that encourage long periods of near focus while simultaneously depriving eyes of the light conditions that evolved to regulate their growth. The eye adapts, as biological systems always do, not out of failure, but out of fidelity to the signals it receives. 

The solution to the modern myopia problem, then, is both frustratingly simple and deeply unfashionable. It does not involve a new app, a clever piece of classroom technology, or some future retinal implant that will one day be marketed with reassuring stock photos of smiling children and the word “innovation” written somewhere nearby. It involves time, space, and light, and, perhaps most controversially, giving your eyes permission to wander. 

Eyes evolved in a world of distance and brightness, of movement, mess, and unpredictability. They function best when the bodies they belong to are running, climbing, overestimating themselves, recovering, and occasionally staring into the middle distance with no obvious purpose. Two hours outside each day will not solve every problem of modern life, but the evidence suggests it does something quietly remarkable for vision. 

This does not require a radical rejection of screens, nor does it mean that reading, homework, or digital life are inherently damaging. Near work has always been part of human life, from cave paintings to codices to coursework. What has changed is the balance. We have replaced outdoor time not with something equivalent, but with something biologically very different, and vastly dimmer. The eye, presented with a consistently close, dim world, adapts accordingly. 

What followed was not merely the loss of travelators,  
but a childhood conducted almost entirely at arm’s length. 

Which brings us back, inevitably, to Gladiators. 

Gladiators is back on our TV screens! Twenty-five years after it was cancelled, the formative show of my childhood has returned, and you’d better believe I’ve applied to be a contestant. I like to imagine that the showrunners are doing a public good. The causal link between the cancellation of Gladiators and the rise in myopia may be difficult to prove, but it is, I think you’ll agree, hard to ignore. What followed was not merely the loss of travelators, but a childhood conducted almost entirely at arm’s length. 

Now that it’s back – and you’ve watched a few clips on YouTube and are, naturally, convinced you could do it – perhaps the best preparation is the old-fashioned kind, involving fresh air, sunlight, and unnecessary exertion. Go outside and train. Run. Jump. Dodge, duck, dip, dive and dodge. Look further than the end of your own arm for sustained periods of time. It won’t just help keep your eyes healthy – it might prepare you for the showdown young Jack never got to have. 

And hey, if your friends can’t be bothered to get tickets to watch you compete live: it’s 2026, so they can always watch you on a phone screen. 

At a sensible distance. 

Written by Jack Hooper, January 29, 2026.