Balloons and hot air

Tesco booked a clown called Barney Baloney to entertain children for five hours at a supermarket in Leeds, then wiped the silly smile off his face by telling him that he couldn’t use balloons as part of his act.

A children’s entertainer performing without balloons? Difficult to imagine.

But according to Tesco it was just possible that some of the children in the audience ‘might be allergic to latex’ (the natural rubber from which balloons are made).

I confess that I had never heard of latex allergy and had to look it up.

How many people are susceptible to it? Nobody knows, say dermatologists, but it is certainly less than 1% of the population. Oh, and it’s something that tends to affect children far less than adults.

Nevertheless, part of Mr Baloney’s act was to twist balloons into shapes – like dogs and giraffes and aeroplanes – and hand them to the children to take home.

Tesco were taking no chances of that happening, and one of its customer’s kids possibly developing a runny nose (which, in an extreme case, is what we’re talking about here).

He’d already been warned, at an earlier booking, that it was unacceptable to fashion balloons into shapes that looked like guns, in case children were encouraged to commit violence, although sword shapes were apparently ok.

That’s how it goes, as we know. Blow up a balloon and twist it so that anyone with a really vivid imagination could think it looked vaguely like a gun, and next thing the toddlers will do is go down to the hunting supply shop to buy revolvers and shoot all their classmates. But nobody would be daft enough to think you could successfully stab anybody with a bendy rubber sword or dagger.

You might think that would be bad enough for a kiddies’ entertainer to put up with – especially one who is booked for a full five-hour gig – but balloons were only the latest blow to his routine.

He’d already had his bubble-making machine banned because he couldn’t get public liability insurance for it.

The amount of damage that a few aerated drops of soapy water might inflict on an audience might seem negligible to you or me but, then, we are not in the Elfen Sifety industry.

No: what happens to these bubbles, inevitably, is that they fall to the ground.

Youngsters might slip on the liquid and hurt themselves.

Why hadn’t you thought of that?

‘The way things are going, I’ll soon have no act left,’ complained the sad clown, who is more formally known as Tony Turner, and comes from Sheffield.

But Tesco says: ‘This is a health and safety issue. [See?] We have banned balloons because latex is used in the manufacture of them and this can trigger an allergic reaction in some children. We always have the welfare of children at heart.’

Of course they do.

And so next, no doubt, they will ban the sale of balloons for parties, and of all rubber toys as well as those things babies suck on that we used to call dummies but are now called comforters or pacifiers. And teats for babies bottles, and rubber bands (how will they pack asparagus?) and adhesive tape and stretch bandages.

Has it occurred to Tesco or the Health & Safety nazis, I wonder, what condoms are made of?

So much for safe sex, eh?
#