Arsenic bon-bons, toxic toffees and a very Victorian sticky end
Chew on this, next time you unwrap a toffee penny: Victorian sweetmakers were such Scrooges that, to make each sticky batch go further, they would pour candlewax into the mix.
And that wasn’t their nastiest trick, as The Sweet Makers: A Victorian Treat (BBC2) revealed. Plaster of Paris and ground limestone were added to boiled sweets. Poisonous coal tar waste was a food colouring: it turned rock red. even if a thermometer broke and leaked toxic mercury into the boiling goo, the confectioners kept on stirring.
You might think killing your young customers was bad for business, but in Bradford in 1858, stallowner william hardaker — known to all the local children as humbug Billy — sold bags of peppermint bon-bons so poisonous that 20 people died and 200 were taken seriously ill.
Billy’s supplier had been using arsenic, at a ha’penny a pound, instead of sugar, which cost at least ten times as much.
Such psychotic indifference to human life, for the sake of a quick profit, might seem incredible today — until you read the papers and see that dozens of British drugusers may have died this year after their heroin was bulked out with a painkiller called Fentanyl.
Class A drugs today, peppermint humbugs back then . . . so much for progress.
On a more innocent note, it’s fun to see modern cooks try their hands at historic techniques for making sweetshop goodies, but somehow less engrossing than watching cakes rise on Bake Off.
why sponges and eclairs make endlessly exciting television, while fruit pastilles are good only for a quirky one- off, is one of the mysteries of the medium.
This short series has been crammed with interesting asides. Did you know, for instance, that the same Tate who is synonymous with London’s art galleries was one-half of Tate & Lyle? Sugar might rot the teeth, but it’s grand for the intellect.
Though the four confectioners in this show have worked hard, the director relied too much on the lazy conventions of historical reality shows.
These dictate that there must be tears and, inevitably, one of the cooks had a good sniffle as he read a letter from a world war I Tommy in the trenches who enjoyed his chocolate ration so much, he wrote to Rowntree’s and thanked them.
Dry your eyes — this is history, not the X Factor.
emotions clouded the issues as well in Hyper Evolution: The Rise Of The Robots (BBC4), as evolutionary biologist Dr Ben Garrod fretted that artificial intelligence is getting too darn smart. ‘It’s like the arrival of a new species,’ he wailed. what will we do when the machines rise up and try to kill us all?
The short answer is: open a door. One of the most advanced robots in the world, an android called Valkyrie, which has been built to start colonising Mars within the next 20 years, was tasked with walking through a doorway.
Valkyrie couldn’t do it. This useless waste of components looked like it had been knocking back pints of wD-40 since breakfast. every step was a stumble.
The only cyborg that really worked was Alpha, the bongoplaying robot who starred in a 1932 film short called The Face Of Things To Come.
Dr Ben’s co-presenter, Professor Danielle George, seemed impressed by the array of valves and turntables installed in Alpha’s chest cavity, but I suspect he was more puppet than robot. Don’t worry about artificial intelligence. There was little sign of any in this show.