With its losses mounting, right-wing TV ‘new’ channel Bulldog News has been trying to diversify its programming, in the hope of attracting more general audiences, rather than just rabidly reactionary neo-Nazis. In an attempt to cash in both on the recent eightieth anniversary of D-Day and the enduring popularity of reality TV formats in which ordinary people are put into extraordinary situations, the Channel has recently completed filming of ‘Blitzkrieg Street’. “It’s sort of like a cross between Channel Four’s ‘The 1940s House’ and the BBC’s ‘Castaway,’ Bulldog News programme director Jude Bellend told The Sleaze. “In it, we put an ordinary British family through the rigours of surviving World War Two on the home front: the rationing, the deprivation, even the terror!” The Sleaze has subsequently spoken to the family selected to star in the yet to be aired series and they have revealed the ordeal they claim to have been put through by the TV company, alleging that their lives have been ruined by the experience. 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 told The Sleaze how the TV channel had transformed an area of Dartford into a replica of 1940s Britain, complete with sandbags, air raid shelters and black pout restrictions. “From the outset, I found that every time I left the house we were living in for the show, I was pursued by mobs of youths shouting “Coward!” because wasn’t in uniform,” he reveals. “On one occasion several women accosted me at a bus stop and spat at me whilst screeching that their brave sons were risking their lives fighting the Nazi menace whilst draft-dodging war-profiteers like me 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. 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 Bulldog News 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 wereappalled, 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. Even a trip to the ‘wartime’ seaside offered no respite, with Jones’ barely recovered 76 year old mother finding herself being strafed by an enemy aircraft as she walked along the promenade. “The bastards had hired a vintage Messerscmitt Bf 109 fighter to carry out the attack – in the name of realism, they claimed!” an angry Jones told us. “The use of live ammunition – again, in the name of realism – was highly irresponsible. 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!”
Initially unable to access the beach due to barbed wire and other defences, the family were eventually allowed a few hours on its edge, but even this turned out to be part of the TV company’s attempts at artificially creating drama. “We were just relaxing, when these boats suddenly started landing and hundreds of ‘German’ soldiers started wading ashore, firing what seemed to be live ammunition at us – we were terrified,” explains Jones. “We were told that we had to defend the beach from the invasion and were given a machine gun and a mortar – we started mowing the ‘Germans’ down by the dozen. Still more were blown up by landmines! It was absolute Hell! The kids were hysterical, although my mother seemed to be quite enjoying it!” Jones strongly suspects that the ‘Germans’ were actually asylum seekers, given boats, uniforms and rifles by the production company in France and paid to cross the Channel, not realising the reception they would receive. “What makes it worse was that there wasn’t even a real German invasion during the war,” he says. “I did challenge them on that, pointing out that it was meant to be a reality TV show, but they just said that they were exploring hypothetical situations that people of the time might have had to face.”
In another attempt at wartime realism, the family were horrified to find that their fifteen year old daughter Sally had been made pregnant by a black 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 Bulldog News 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!” The channel has so far refused to comment on the allegations made by the Jones family.
