Your Kitchen – 60 Years Of Fads & Gadgets review: When teabags, fridges and the spice rack were wonders of the Space Age

Your Kitchen: 60 Years Of Fads & Gadgets (Channel 5) 

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Bring back the toasted sandwich. It’s a scandal they ever went out of fashion — a victim of the Delia Smith culture that claimed everyone ought to make a bit more effort in the kitchen.

For some of us, the Breville snack-and-sandwich toaster was the only guaranteed method of making a hot meal that didn’t carry the risk of blowing the fusebox, setting off the smoke alarms or burning down the kitchen.

Microwave ovens weren’t affordable. Eye-level grills on gas cookers could singe your eyebrows. But the Breville was fairly foolproof, as long as you remembered not to rest your hand on the metal exterior . . . and never, ever to bite into a toastie before the contents had a chance to cool off.

Narrator Dorothy Atkinson warned us, on Your Kitchen: 60 Years Of Fads & Gadgets, that tomatoes in a toasted sandwich were heated to a molten 230°C. No wonder they could take the skin off the roof of your mouth.

The pleasure of shows like this is shouting, ‘We had one of those things!’ or sighing enviously, ‘Dad always said they were too expensive.’

Comedian Jenny Eclair (pictured) examined the Kenwood Chef with suspicion

At the cheap end of the scale was the rotary whisk, a contraption of cogs and metal blades turned by a handle like a mini-mangle. Celebs Janet Ellis and Danny John-Jules demonstrated by whisking egg whites into fluffy peaks, though that is not using the device for its primary purpose — whipping up Angel Delight.

Comedian Jenny Eclair examined its replacement, the Kenwood Chef, with suspicion. ‘I’m not a pudding person,’ she announced, ‘which surprises people, because of my surname.’

That is indeed surprising, because her surname was originally Hargreaves — ‘Eclair’ is a stage name.

You’d assume it indicated a sweet tooth, especially since, as a student, she was also known as singer Cathy La Crème. (Her only single, I Married A Cult Figure From Salford, can be found online — it sounds like Victoria Wood rapping to electropop.)

Kenwood’s marvellous contraption is still a staple of the kitchen. Its original advertising slogan was based on the idea that a mechanical Chef can make practically anything: ‘But it can’t make your husband buy you one — that’s your job!’

So much of what we take for granted was once an innovation. Teabags, electric kettles, resealable food tubs, even the spice rack were wonders of the Space Age. Perhaps the most unexpected factoid was that only 13 per cent of British homes had an electric fridge at the end of the 1950s.

There was no mention of the chest freezer, which stood brooding at one end of our garage like a sarcophagus filled with bags of peas and budget ice cream.

And too much attention was paid to the Goblin Teasmade, an alarm clock with a water boiler that brewed a tepid cuppa to be sipped as you woke up with Wogan on Radio 2. A cultural icon, but nothing to do with the kitchen.