Health and safety...

The awful, tragic story of the German doctor who killed a man with a lethal overdose on his first shift providing out-of-hours GP cover in Cambridgeshire reminds us all of the importance of health and safety regulations. Some petro-chemical plants I have visited in the course of my media training duties sit you down and demand you watch a 20 minute safety video and then answer 10 questions on the content. Tedious stuff but better than Emmerdale. More than a couple of wrong answers and you are refused entry. Meanwhile, every piece of electrical equipment has to be painstakingly tested "for sparks". The process can take an hour. No worry. Any frustration is far outweighed by the thought of not becoming a human flame-grilled whopper. Of course, you can go too far and journalists like Quentin Letts regularly poke fun at people like "topple testers" who wrestle tombstones on the suggestion that one day in the next millennium one might fall and crush a child or a badger. Headmasters who either ban conker fights or make contestants wear ridiculous laboratory goggles are similarly vilified. No one, of course, wants to return to the exploitation of the coal mines of yesteryear. But one media training delegate in the concrete products industry, a newly promoted manager, rather let his metaphorical safety mask slip, on tape, when he said: "In my day on the shop floor if you caught your hand in a mangle and asked for an entry in the accident book you were considered a nancy boy!" In my experience, newspaper offices appear to have an exemption from legislation, or, if they don't, few people pay the slightest attention to the rules. One time Sun editor Larry Lamb once fell head first on to a metal spike used to transfix unwanted stories. Printers were regularly badly burned by molten metal in pre photo-composition days. My own near-death experience came in the late 1990s in the Sun's Manchester office. From 6pm until midnight I would be the only living creature apart from a rather forlorn goldfish in the advertising department. When it wasn't busy I'd play keepy-uppy with the very ball Michael Owen had used to score a miraculous goal against Argentina in the 1998 World Cup. The Sun, having bought it from the match referee, tried to present it to Michael who was then at Liverpool but he declined because of the fallout from the Hillsborough tragedy. The shift was progressing without incident when I became aware of a strange smell. Not gas, not sewage. A familiar smell, however, that reminded me of the fish market I visited as a child. But not a fishy smell, something chemical. I scoured the interlinked offices for clues in vain. Then I noticed I was becoming drowsy and my eyes were not focusing properly. That reminded me of the days I used to go to the Press Club until 4am. In desperation I rang the office manager who advised me to call 999. Now 111 Piccadilly has 17 floors and that means a mandatory "five pump call-out". So minutes later my solitary confinement was interrupted by 40 firefighters, many in breathing gear. They escorted me from the building and made a more professional search which quickly yielded the culprit: a faulty fridge, like the one pictured, but not (lawyers note) a Hotpoint. Its corroded pipes were leaking lethal ammonia (incidentally a by-product in the breakdown of fish proteins). The man in the white helmet said I had done the right thing. I could so easily have ended up in a fridge of my own and as a front page lead, too, with a posthumous herogram from the news editor no doubt. No, you can't mess with 'elf and safety.