Reality Blitzkrieg

Former participants in a TV show - Channel Four’s The 1940s House - have condemned the programme's makers for taking the concept of reality TV to dangerous extremes. In the show, the Jones family were originally selected to try and live as they would have done during World War Two. Whilst the project was described to the family as a serious documentary, they claim that it was nothing more than exploitative sensationalism, and they allege that they have been severely traumatised by their experiences in the house.

Father of three Rod Jones has described how every time he left the house he was pursued by mobs of youths shouting “Coward!” at him because he wasn’t in uniform. On one occasion several women accosted him at a bus stop and spat at him whilst screeching that their brave sons were risking their lives fighting the Nazi menace whilst draft-dodging war-profiteers like him had it easy. The campaign of terror culminated with a brick being thrown through the Jones’ front window and four white feathers being posted through the letterbox. Mr Jones has also alleged that, in a cynical attempt to boost ratings, Channel Four hired a vintage Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighter to strafe his 76 year old mother as she returned from the shops one afternoon. “The use of live ammunition was highly irresponsible”, an angry Jones told us. “The poor old dear was frightened out of her wits - even after six hand washes and the liberal use of a scrubbing board we still couldn’t put her draws out on the washing line, they were in such a state! We had to burn them eventually!”

In another incident, air raid sirens forced the family into their cellar one night. When they emerged the next morning it was to find their house in ruins and the rest of the street reduced to rubble. “We just thought that the sound of explosions were special effects”, housewife Irene Jones explained. “But Channel Four had actually called in a team of demolition experts to blow up the house and then level the street with bulldozers!” Having been rendered homeless, the Jones family found their two youngest children, Jane aged nine and Toby aged eleven, forcibly evacuated to the country and resettled with a family of complete strangers, whilst eldest son John, aged seventeen, found himself conscripted into the army and sent to a brutal training camp. The remaining members of the family were forced to live out of the unheated cellar, which was running with damp. Unsurprisingly, Grandma Jones caught pneumonia - which couldn’t be treated due to the wartime lack of penicillin “We were appalled, but Channel Four assured us that it was all in the name of realism”, says Irene. In a desperate attempt to make ends meet, Rod was forced to resort to selling black-market petrol siphoned from the fuel tanks of military vehicles.

In another attempt at wartime realism, the family were horrified to find that their fifteen year old daughter Sally had been made pregnant by an American GI, who had seduced her with silk stockings , Hershey bars and tales of the fabulous life that awaited her in his luxurious one-room shack in Tennessee. Having knocked young Sally up, the GI was shipped off to Normandy. Sally found herself having to run a gauntlet of fishwives calling her a “whore” and a “trollop” as she went to and from school everyday. Eventually the family were forced to take Sally to a 1940s-style drunken backstreet abortionist, whose only surgical instrument was a button-hook sterilised in gin. The final straw for the Jones family came when they received the shocking news that their cousin Tom had been lost at sea to enemy action. “We just couldn’t believe it”, an astonished Rod Jones told us. “Apparently Tom had taken the ferry to Dieppe on a day-trip, so Channel Four decided to hire a U-Boat and have the ferry torpedoed on its return journey! Over two hundred people died! They said that it was essential for us to experience sudden traumatic loss as many families had in the 1940s. We told them to stick their programme and walked out!” Channel Four was forced to re-film the entire series with a different family. The channel has so far refused to comment on the allegations made by the Jones family.