BBC4
As if you didn’t have enough to worry about in Victorian England with Jack the Ripper, the Crimean War and the advent of Music Hall your real problems started when you shut your own front door after a hard day shovelling shit out of cuckoo clocks. The sad truth is that the Victorian home contained more vicious killers than an episode of The Guilty featuring Puke, a baby killer stuffed Breathless and Noel Edmonds Late Late Breakfast Show combined. On New Hidden Killers: The Victorian Home Dr Suzannah Lipscomb explains how a perfect storm of unfettered capitalism, shitty legislation and new food processing techniques led to unprecedented food adulteration. Chalk in your baking soda, iron sulphate in your tea leaves, plaster of Paris in your flour – these fucks didn’t care. They’d rot away your insides if it turned over a penny or two. Gastritis inevitably followed. You’d literally shit yourself to death.
Chalk in your baking soda, iron sulphate in your tea leaves, plaster of Paris in your flour – these fucks didn’t care.
It didn’t end there. Victorians added Borax to on-the-turn milk to disguise the sourness. That’s awesome and stuff but the Borax didn’t kill the bacteria, just evened out the pH levels. The result was a proliferation of bovine TB. An estimated half a million children died as a result. Still it put the brakes on the population boom.
An estimated half a million children died as a result. Still it put the brakes on the population boom.
If you somehow miraculously survived childhood you had to negotiate neck-breaking stairs, exploding toilets and women being turned into walking fucking blowtorches like Miss Haversham by celluloid trinkets. If they didn’t finish you off then there were always the household poisons routinely sold in almost identical packaging to regular groceries.
Women were turned into walking fucking blowtorches like Miss Haversham by celluloid trinkets.
So the next time you hear Littlejohn or one of his dipshit fellow travellers blurting about the tyranny of elf’n’safety you may want to remind them that there’s a reason for regulation – it separates us from savagery. And then stick Borax in his Complan, strychnine in his coffee and replace his toupee with a non-union celluloid equivalent.
The verdict: I laugh at your locks with my celluloid strip (and then burn my arm off).
Marks out of 10: 7
