Last night's TV: Hidden killers of the post-war home
FOR many reasons Hidden Killers of the Post-War Home (BBC4) is a very peculiar series.
Lipscomb floats through instalments of Georgian and Victorian homes
There’s the title for a start, which suggests that alongside the hidden killers there must have been other, entirely blatant ones.
So what were they, then? Anacondas? Tsetse flies? Self-firing sub-machine guns? If you had any of those in your home, wouldn’t you just move house?
Then there is Suzannah Lipscomb, a respected historian who floats through each instalment in a floral frock, looking wonderstruck by the soft furnishings.
She looks like she is about to announce three years’ interest-free credit on all sofas this Bank Holiday Weekend.
Instead, she reels off a list of all the horrid ways in which the people of the past unwittingly met their deaths in the comfort of their own living rooms. As she and her series move through time, moreover, the whole point of it rather begins to unravel.
There is a justification for talking about the hidden killers stalking Georgian or Victorian homes. Back then, due to lack of science, people did not know their arsenic-laced wallpaper was slowly doing them in, or that corsets mangled up your insides.
Lipscomb reels off a list of all the horrid ways in which past people met death
The consistent feature of all the post-war stories, on the other hand, was that they came from newspaper reports and coroners’ proceedings.
Far from being a hidden killer, chemistry sets were known to be lethal in the hands of children, as many a headline and verdict recorded.
People still gave them to kids, though, because other people kept making them. The same went for nylon nighties, stepladders and raw poultry, all clearly viewed as a hazard by many.
The dangers were not unknown, it just took enough people dying as a result of them for them to be engineered out. But that is not the only point of this show.
The deadly DIY boom arose because builders were rebuilding bomb-damaged Britain
In a way, the accidents are a handy route to discussing the changing history of domestic life.
The deadly DIY boom, for example, came about because all the qualified builders were rebuilding bomb-damaged Britain. Salmonella only affected poultry when intensive rearing and factory processing put cheap roasting birds on everyone’s tables.
Going Going Gone Nick: Broomfield's disappearing Britain
It’s really a weirdly angled history of progress – or the nasty things it brings with it. From the late former Prime Minister, Lady Thatcher to the late Afrikaner leader Eugène Terre’Blanche, film-maker Nick Broomfield has a trademark style of confronting people while clutching a big furry microphone.
He went for the same approach in Going GoING Gone: Nick Broomfield’s Disappearing Britain (BBC4) although it sometimes appeared he was picking a fight out of habit.
Buildings were bulldozed in Liverpool once declared unsafe
Looking round Liverpool’s historic (and derelict) Wellington Rooms, a young planning officer steadfastly refused to be irritated by him.
In Cardiff, you sensed he was actually a little disappointed when the authorities let him in to film the Coal Exchange. He had plenty to be angry about, not least the council pastime of letting vital old buildings rot.
Once a building has deteriorated to a certain point, it can be declared unsafe and, regardless of its significance, bulldozed. Broomfield’s pair of films were a eulogy to two spaces that were not just buildings, but backdrops for history.
They also provided us with a rare glimpse into the film-maker’s own life, passions and early work. He’s more than just a big furry microphone