Dr Xand Van Tulleken and Raksha Dave investigate the Great Smog of 1952 – the deadliest environmental disaster ever recorded and one of the world’s worst peacetime catastrophes.
Lasting just over four days, the Great Smog plunged London into a terrifyingly murky gloom – the acrid pollution seeping into homes, leaving Londoners gasping for breath, shutting down transport and emergency services, overwhelming hospitals and undertakers alike. It caused chaos and death. The Government was unprepared. Churchill, the great wartime hero, did nothing.
Official Government figures from the time report 4,000 casualties. But as viewers can discover in this series, the real death toll is closer to a shocking 12,000 deaths caused by the four-day crisis. Busting myths, uncovering new facts, and employing revealing experiments, our team of presenters will immerse themselves in the smog, to unpick the true story of this deadly catastrophe.
In the first episode (Wednesday, 9pm) Eyewitnesses – octogenarians and older – who were children at the time, paint a picture of a city under siege by a new menace. They retrace their steps and describe what they saw, how they felt – and whether they lost loved ones. It’s an event that has startling resonances for us as we’re faced with the disastrous consequences of 21st century pollution.
Channel 5 tell this dramatic story beat-by-beat, looking at the causes of the smog and the consequences for the residents of the city. An hour-by-hour chronology of the smog forms the spine of the series, starting when a sudden, choking, impenetrable fog started to settle on the London, due to unique weather conditions and pollution; and ending when the weather changed and the smog lifted as quickly as it had arrived.
Starting in Earl’s Court as the smog first began and where the first animals began to die, Xand will draw on the stories of key people who lived through the disaster to shed new light on how the smog started, how it progressed, and paint a picture of what London was like in the thick of the smog. By day two, London’s hospitals and services were becoming overwhelmed. These stories will paint a vivid and visceral story of this dramatic period.
In the second episode (Thursday, 9pm) Dr Xand Van Tulleken and Raksha Dave continue their investigation into the Great Smog of 1952 – the deadliest environmental disaster ever recorded and one of the world’s worst peacetime catastrophes.
Now in its third day, the Great Smog had plunged London into a terrifyingly murky gloom and the acrid pollution was seeping into homes. Now, healthy Londoners were being suffocated by the toxic smog, gasping for breath and flooding into hospitals. The smog had already shut down transport and emergency services, and now hospitals were overwhelmed and undertakers were working 24 hours a day as the death rate spiralled.
This episode explores the fear that paralysed the city – from the public not knowing or understanding what was happening, the government’s lack of action, to the undertakers working 24 hours a day. And we’ll reveal how criminals took advantage of the gloom.
The programme hears first-person testimony from those who lived through the time. Channel 5 hear from London residents who were lost in their own street, bus drivers being guided through the pall by colleagues holding flares, and people desperately trying to get relatives to hospitals when emergency services stopped operating.
By day four, undertakers were working non-stop trying to cope with what was later called, in news reports ‘the greatest mass murderer of our time’. As the story concludes, the programme reveals why and how the smog lifted and London metaphorically and physically began to breathe again. Xand Van Tulleken will discover the devastation left in the smog’s wake and ask what the real death toll was.
The Great Smog: Winter of ’52, Channel 5, 9 pm Wednesday (7th September) and Thursday (8th)
