Should fireworks be banned? Two writers go head-to-head
With shops refusing to sell fireworks, is it time we all gave Bonfire Night a rest? Here, two writers light the blue touch paper…
Bill Turnbull It’s a great family night out, but Guy Fawkes Night can be torture for our beloved pets
Ihave a confession to make. I don’t really like fireworks. I don’t like them at all, not since I was a news reporter and found myself caught up in a noisy Russian conflict a quarter of a century ago in which people died.
Shortly after I returned to the UK, I took my kids to a fireworks display. While everyone else was gasping at the night sky, all I wanted to do was take cover in a phone box.
So I have a lot of sympathy for anyone – animals included – who finds them frightening. At the weekend, an 18-week-old terrier puppy in South Yorkshire died from a heart attack after a local display.
Guy Fawkes Night can be torture for our pets. A human being can rationalise what’s going on during fireworks season – a dog or cat can’t. For all they know, the world might be coming to an end.
Fortunately for the three Turnbull Labradors – all Classic FM devotees, naturally – the nearest firework displays in our precious corner of Suffolk are a couple of miles away. But I remember how, when we lived in the Home Counties, one of our previous dogs would cower at the sound of anything fizzing in the dark. She had years of experience as a gun dog, but the percussion of the big bangs terrified her – and it went on for weeks.
So it’s been a pleasure to be able to do something to comfort our furry friends by presenting Pet Sounds on Classic FM: three hours of music selected especially for its soothing qualities. On Saturday, we played pieces like Mina, written by Elgar for one of his beloved Cairn terriers. Also on the playlist: Crazy Dog by John Barry, Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending, and The Swan from Saint-saëns’s Carnival of the Animals.
All calming and, I’m pleased to say, popular – it began trending on Twitter. Last year’s show was probably the best-received of my entire career in broadcasting. Which is why I was delighted to do it all again this year.
But when more than 300,000 people signed a petition to ban the sale of fireworks to the public as a nuisance scaring “animals, young children and people with a phobia”, it came up against a brick wall in Parliament.
However, supermarkets have sensed the change in mood. Aldi, Asda and Morrisons announced they would sell only low-noise fireworks, while Sainsbury’s decided to take them off the shelves completely.
This leaves us with the public displays, which provide disturbing light and noise that our furry friends cannot comprehend. The National Farmers’ Union is begging people to think twice before setting off sky lanterns, which can cause serious damage to livestock.
The RSPCA receives hundreds of calls every year to deal with fireworkrelated incidents. Dozens of horses have been injured over the past decade; last year, one literally ran itself to death in panic. And heaven help the poor hedgehog who seeks shelter in the base of a bonfire.
All this, though, has to be weighed against the undoubtable joys of a family outing on Bonfire Night. It is great fun.
I just wonder if it has to be quite so loud.
Bill Turnbull presents the second Pet Sounds programme this evening, from 7pm to 10pm on Classic FM – available across the UK on 100-102 FM, DAB digital radio and on the Global Player
Julie Burchill Fireworks Night is no time for the nanny state – let grown-ups get on with enjoying it
For those who get a kick out of worrying, this season is a smorgasbord of solicitude, taking in both Hallowe’en and Bonfire Night. The Dupes of Hazard are keen for us to avoid both home fireworks and pumpkin-carving, with families last week being encouraged by charities to put knives away in favour of paints as carving spooky designs were accidents waiting to happen.
I thought the nanny state couldn’t get any worse when this summer I heard a BBC television reporter babbling: “Here we are at Manchester
Pride – having fun and STAYING
HYDRATED!” It’s been a good few decades since I made a spectacle of myself at such a gathering, but I do remember that the only hydration we were interested in came in hip flasks. I was wrong. Fireworks – once associated with pleasant things like mind-blowing sex and mulled wine – are now the work of the devil; our furry friends will be driven to self-soothe by listening to Classic FM’S Pet Sounds – “a range of soothing music to calm nerves and ease stress during the noise and bright lights of the season”. I fear that one day soon, children will never know the unsullied glee of watching their dads wobbling around in the dark nailing a Catherine wheel to a fence.
And now that the nights are drawing in and it’s “feeling nippy”, breakfast TV presenters will be warning us to “wrap up warm” and “keep hold of that umbrella”.
On hearing these words, I am instantly transported back to being a mardy teenager, refusing to wear a coat, even in sub-zero temperatures, as a sure way to get a rise out of my poor mother.
I know what I’d like to do with any umbrella to hand if I ever met one of these weather-warning wet-blankets, and it would definitely involve somewhere where the sun doesn’t (“gloriously”, as these goons gibber whenever it appears) shine.
And now we are having the first December election since 1923. In many less pampered places on this planet, having the right to vote would be a cause for celebration, dedication and maybe travelling many miles on foot in order to solemnly affirm the splendour of democracy.
But here, in our First World playpen, it’s merely something else to get in a kerfuffle about. Oooh, it might be dark – you need an escort to the polling station at 7pm!
Why are we encouraged to fret and fuss about the rain, dark and cold in a country where it is more often than not rainy, dark and cold? Do the Scandinavians do it? I bet they don’t. I bet every Tove, Dierk and Harald uses it as a lovely excuse to dress up in sexy boots and snuggly jumpers, get merry on glögg and go for long walks in only sightly scary forests.
The cold and dark seem not to have put the Scandinavian nations off voting. But to hear our politicians and TV commentators mithering on about it, you’d think we were being asked to walk across glass and through fire to put our X in the box.
In fact, we’re so much tougher than we’re given credit for – in 1974, the February election attracted a turnout higher than the 1970 summer election.
The highest turnout for any post-war election was in 1950, which also took place in February, popularly considered to be the most miserable month of the year – “The great grey beast” as Clive Barker called it in The Thief of
Always.
If you are affected by this Brexit break-up storyline, or if you find scenes from democracy disturbing, why don’t you just go back to bed till it’s all over, and let the grown-ups get on with the sometimes harsh, sometimes messy, but generally brilliant business of living, whatever the weather?
Meanwhile, you’ll find me not wrapping up warm, hydrating myself with something from a hip flask and lighting up the sky like sex with Bruce Springsteen on the 4th of July. Cheers!