30 years since the Late late breakfast show was ended

Health and safety back then was very poor and nonexistent on many occasions. The exploding cooker on The Young Ones, an explosion in TC8 for Resurrection Of The Daleks in Doctor Who that was so loud TV Centre staff alerted security.

What's sad is that this could have been avoided. I watched this show religiously and when the guy had the serious accident in the car, they should have thought twice about these dangerous stunts and ditched them. Now we see stunts like this on I'm A Celebrity but with risk assessments and lots of safeguards in place, safeguards and risk assessments The Late Late Breakfast Show should have had.

I will never forget the shock of seeing Michael Lush's death on the news. A very sad and avoidable death.

Your just give a good reason why there had to ditch the stunts, If proper risk assessments are doing. Whats more shocking is the BBC were warned before hand about that stunt and did bugger all to make sure it was safe.

Inexcusable. They had one near miss on The Late Late Breakfast Show and just carried on.

I think that's been pretty standard boilerplate for decades, as opposed to anything BBC-specific.



Perhaps not over here, since then, but it's only been six years since a man was made quadriplegic after a stunt wrong live on the German version of You Bet :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wetten,_dass..%3F#Samuel_Koch_incident

I don't know what effect it had on health and safety culture over there, though it was the certainly the beginning of the end of what was eventually a 33-year run.

Yes, but it was thirty years ago. Different times. Wearing seat belts in the front of a car only became law in 1983, and wearing rear seat belts not until 1989.

Twenty years earlier in the early 60s as a baby I spent some time in a hospital incubator, that had its power cable stuffed into a socket using matches. My parents drove me around with my cot sliding around in the back of their van.

Viewing these practises from the present day is horrifying, but at the time it was all thought to be fine.

It's Health & Safety gone mad!


Seriously though, people should remember these things when they hear today's politicians saying H&S laws are just a bunch of red tape stopping people from using common sense.

Anyone who has that opinion about health and safety deserves to fall out of a window or something.

I kid. But only a little bit. Popularist ****.

Coincidently the presenter of that programme was also the presenter of the German version of Noels House Party: Gottschalks Haus Party


I was referring more to the stunt itself, jumping cars over cars, or bikes over buses, or buses over cars used to be a staple of family entertainment. Very rare to see it at all these days

I've seen the episode before that, and on it Noel more or less just says, if you fancy doing some car jumping, just turn up at Santa Pod next Saturday and you can have a go. It's as casual and informal as that. I know Mike Smith says that they were seriously considering taking it off after that. It was another era, though, as you say - they got in trouble at one point for using news clips out of context without permission, and someone who was in one complained and they had to apologise.



This didn't half give me the willies when I was young. The first I heard of it was when Mike Smith wasn't doing his Radio 1 show on the Friday morning and whoever was standing in for him, I think Adrian John, said Smitty wasn't there "because of an accident on The Late Late Breakfast Show". I had no idea what they were talking about until someone mentioned it in school. You can't overestimate the impact this had at the time, it was all we talked about in school for ages.

I also vividly remember the picture they used in the local paper, because that week the BBC Picture Desk had coincidentally released a promotional picture for the show with Smitty whispering in Noel's ear and Noel looking shocked. I remember the local paper using that, clearly they had it hanging around, and stupid kid that I was, I was under the impression that was the moment Noel found out. Although I have heard since that the same picture then did the rounds at TV Centre with suitably tasteless captions.

I remember hearing about it on the radio on the way back from cubs that evening. Though I remember not hearing the details, only that someone had been killed on a TV programme. As it was Thursday I assumed it was someone on Tomorrow's World!