Hidden Killers of the Post-War Home (BBC4, Wednesday) might have brought a grim smile to the face of every woman who’s ever raged, silently or vocally, about the drudgery of housework.

In the post-war era everything was supposed to change for the Western housewife. She’d no longer skin her knuckles on the mangle or have her arms alternately scalded and frozen by hand-washing clothes. She wouldn’t have to develop Jeff Capes-style muscles from carpet-beating and it wouldn’t take hours to plan and prepare a meal, only to spend further hours cleaning the pots and plates, only to start it all again the next day.

Technology would liberate women from all of this. The post-war home with its new gadgets, fabrics and devices would be a place of gliding, gleaming luxury. Oh, you lucky housewives!

The women who were elbowed back into the kitchen after the war must have known very well that this was all a con. New washing machines and Hoovers might give the appearance of liberation from hard work but the women were still stuck at home while enjoying that wonderful “liberation”, and this show seemed a wonderfully clever vindication of that knowledge.

It showed the post-war home as a place of tricks, traps, poisons and dangers, and so it gradually picked apart nostalgia and the happy housewife dream. The house that promised liberation was actually bristling with hidden and horrible dangers.

The chemistry set your son is playing with upstairs (and it would have been a gift only for boys in the 1950s) is stuffed with vials, tubes and powders, all just itching to swirl together in a white explosion. And the easy-clean, non-iron, luxury fabrics you wear to bed might flare up into a fireball if you happen to walk past the stove.

What of those newly invented coverings and coatings in the house? They’ll quickly melt in a fire and send cyanide gas drifting up to your bedroom.

And the rosy-cheeked wife sits in the centre of this death trap, grateful to her husband for providing all this lovely luxury….



OVER on Channel 4, there was unexpected tenderness from Secret Life of the Human Pups (C4, Wednesday).

This was a documentary about men who love to dress and live as pups – and we’re not talking about putting a doggy collar on for a bit of fun.

The men on the pup scene are incredibly dedicated to living a dog’s life. One of them powders his hairy body so he can be pulled and pinched into a Dalmatian-spotted, skin-tight pup costume, and then he’ll lie on the carpet to get his tummy tickled. Those who understand weird caresses or the appeal of latex or leather might be nodding along in understanding, but then things took a stranger turn.

He retreated to a cage, where he bedded down for the evening on his dog blanket and, weirder still, lifted his bedding to show he’d lined his cage with absorbent pads in case he needed a puppy pee-pee during the night.

I think the revelation of the cage and the pee pads might have lost him his audience.

At that point, a mildly humorous fetish involving collars and begging took off into the stratosphere of strangeness.

At this point, I expected the show to go full “Channel 4” on the pup-men. The channel loves a good sex documentary so we were going to see some “doggy-style” antics, surely? But, to my delight, the show ignored that predictable path and instead showed us that being a “human pup” is not about sex.

Admit it, our minds naturally thought dressing as a pup was a sexual thing, what with all those leads and collars and being made to beg, but the men here spoke of pup-life as an escape from stress and they revelled in the sheer delight of adopting the persona of a creature who is soft, innocent and playful.

You can choose to believe them or not.

I did, and was genuinely intrigued. If these men need to escape into a gentle, soft world, then why choose pups? Why not teddy bears? Pink unicorns? Doves? Perhaps there are such clandestine groups out there and I’m sure Channel 4 will get to them eventually.

The innocent world of the pups was demonstrated, with a frisson of discomfort, when one of them went to Belgium to compete in a contest to find the Pup of the Year. Our gentle little Dalmatian went across the Channel and showed the Europeans his sweetness and innocence, and chose to draw a nice picture for the judges, but he was swamped by the brash European pups for whom it was most definitely a sex thing.

The nice little British puppy recoiled from all this, and was quietly sad. There’s no room on the kinky continental pup scene for an innocent lad like him.


I’D BEEN looking forward to Rovers (Sky1, Tuesday).

Anyone who loved The Royle Family would have been similarly interested to see it as it promised us a comedy about the dreary lives of the working classes, re-uniting Dave and Barbara (Craig Cash as Pete and Sue Johnston as Doreen, pictured), but it’s there that comparisons with The Royle Family, or with any other decent comedy, have to end.

Rovers was a disappointment. Perhaps it’s just a very gentle comedy, which seems to be the trend just now with recent BBC sitcoms such as Boomers, Mum and Love, Nina.

But are such shows “gentle” or just not particularly funny?

Rovers should have found it hard to be gentle, being set amid the northern English working class, whose lives seem to have been drained of all colour except the blue of their football team.

This scenario should offer lavish opportunity for political comment and scathing observations – but there were none, unless we count a local woman who’d been “sloshing it about” and shamelessly wheeled her resultant “black baby” around a carpet showroom.

But Harry Enfield did this with his Wayne and Waynetta Slob characters in the 1990s, when Waynetta professed a need for “a little brown baby” so she could acquire imagined spectacular benefits from the council.

There was little that was new in Rovers. Even its theme, melancholy brass band music, the nostalgic soundtrack of northern England, seemed pinched from Corrie.