Uranium toys, killer kettles . . . why the 1950s home was lethal
You can keep your Xboxes and smartphones. The world’s greatest toy, as dangerous as it was engrossing, was the chemistry set — and historian Suzannah Lipscomb had a kit in mint condition on Hidden Killers Of The Postwar Home (BBC4).
Hers featured asbestos heat mats, uranium dust and a Geiger counter. I should probably be grateful that my boyhood set came from the cheap end of the range, but it still contained enough lethal hazards to keep a nine-year-old blissfully entertained.
There were the flammable crystals that shot gouts of fire out of testtubes, and the white powders, labelled ‘Poisonous: Do not inhale’, that emitted a nauseous pong of rotten eggs when dissolved in solution.
one excellent game was to cork a concoction and heat it, to time how long it took the glass vial to explode.
The chemistry set was confiscated after I set fire to the carpet. My mother beat out the flames — and my nascent career in science — with her shoe.
Strolling round a perfectly preserved Fifties home, Dr Lipscomb counted off a dozen ways that old-fashioned household goods could kill us, and had no time to list scores more.
one fine example was the electric kettle designed to spit out its power cord when the water boiled: if that cable landed in the washing-up bowl, anyone scrubbing dishes would be electrocuted.
But she missed a much simpler hazard — metal saucepans with metal handles. You had to be posh to afford heat-resistant cookware. Most people used a tea towel to seize the red-hot grip and tried not to let the cloth catch light on the gas hob.
Fireguards for hearths were another danger highlighted on the show. They rarely fitted securely and, being metal, were themselves a frequent cause of burns.
But what about the open two-bar electric fire? one of the commonest accidents in the home was to trip and fall on the glowing coils, searing the flesh and setting light to clothes.
Come to that, how about the combination of loose rugs and old socks? No one went barefooted during winter, in the days before double-glazing, and few could boast of fitted carpets. When you were shuffling round the house in worn-out footwarmers, rumpled rugs were as deadly as tripwires.
Suzannah’s research threw up a few killers I had completely forgotten. Remember when you had to turn the telly off at the mains overnight to prevent it from over-heating and burning the house down? There was no stand-by button back then.
And what about the horror stories of hedonists who left their electric blankets on all night, only to be fried by faulty wiring? or bathers who heedlessly closed the bathroom window and were suffocated by carbon monoxide fumes? It was safer to be cold.
This one-off documentary achieved the improbable, by making me nostalgic for obsolete ways to die at home. So many were overlooked that it could easily be extended into a three-part series.
Lawnmowers, freezer cabinets, stair rods, lead paints . . . all of them implements of mass destruction. It’s a marvel any of us survived.
Young skater Mia from Glasgow was pursuing injury with dogged enthusiasm in The Making Of An Ice Princess (BBC2). At 12, in training with dreams of the 2022 Winter olympic ice dance squad, she had suffered more accidents than the average stuntman: broken shoulder, broken knee, two broken wrists, you name it.
Her story was a side note in a documentary that mostly focused on Lily, a ten-year-old from Blackpool. The sacrifices she and her family made in pursuit of her dreams were colossal — starting at 4.30am every day to drive 30 miles to the rink in Blackburn, where she trained for six hours solidly.
Equipment and coaching cost her family £1,000 a month. They never ate out or took holidays, and still her parents were in debt up to their eyebrows, with their credit cards maxed out. If we had seen her triumph in a skating competition, this might have seemed almost worthwhile. Instead, poor Lily took a tumble in front of the judges and finished 31st out of 35.
It made for uninspiring viewing.