Series / Worst Jobs In History

Britain's history happened not just by the great figures of the time, but by a host of ordinary people getting their hands dirty doing a lot of terrible jobs.

Tony Robinson, of Blackadder and Time Team fame, introduces us to the worst jobs in history: occupations that are dangerous, unhealthy, boringly monotonous, disgusting, immoral or otherwise terrible from throughout most of British history. The show has aired two seasons, the first of six episodes, each focusing on the worst jobs in a given era (Roman and Anglo-Saxon, The Middle Ages, Tudors, Stuarts, Georgian and Victorian), a Christmas Episode, and then a second season of five episodes, each describing the remaining awful jobs in five different fields (urban, royal, industrial, maritime, and rural).

Regardless of how terrible all the occupations were, Tony Robinson himself reenacted nearly every job; the only exceptions were those which were too dangerous to reproduce for television. An amazing feat, considering that Tony was in his late fifties when the show was being made.

There were two book spin-offs, The Worst Jobs in History, and a book aimed at younger readers which focused on child labour, The Worst Children's Jobs in History.

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Examples of the Worst Jobs:

• An Arm and a Leg: Coin-stampers found guilty of stealing entire coins were punished by having a hand cut off and nailed to the door of the workshop. In the event that the guilty party couldn't be located, the coin stampers' boss would be punished instead.
• Agony of the Feet:
  • Working as an asphalt paviour was guaranteed to result in burnt feet.
  • While cleaning sheep in a stream, Tony had the misfortune of one stepping on his bare foot.
• All for Nothing: Poor James Thornhill spent so many months painting the interior of the Saint Paul's Cathedral's dome, believing it will be the British version Sistine Chapel. But by the time he was finished, the Rococo fashion was all the rage and people considered his work old-fashioned and drab.
• Bad People Abuse Animals: A lot of jobs involved the deaths of innocent animals with one of them being a cat and dog killer during the Black Plague. The parishes of London believed that these animals carried diseases so they hired people to kill them and gave them a pence for every carcass, making them well on their way of earning the national average wage of a shilling a day. And they had a cull; forty thousand dogs and eighty thousand cats were put to their deaths. Mind you, they didn't use humane methods. They used pretty much anything they got their hands on such as knives, logs, clubs and hammers. And the worst part was this only made things worse as cats and dogs were exactly the kind of animals that could have kept the rat population down since the Plague was carried by the fleas on rats. So all those poor cats and dogs died in vain.
• Body Horror:
  • On top of being castrated and rendered incapable of leading a normal lifestyle, Castrati also ran the risk of being quite horribly disfigured by the lack of certain chemicals in their body. They tended to be abnormally tall, obese and with no body hair.
  • Phossy Jaw, as suffered by the Bryant & May matchgirls.
  • Quite a few of the other industrial diseases suffered by factory workers fall under this heading; cup handle-makers ran the risk of slowly crushing their internal organs.
• Boring, but Practical: To lift massive pieces of masonry, get something like a giant hamster wheel and use it with a pulley system. In fact, a large number of the jobs were dull and repetitive, but they worked (and there wasn't any other way to do them anyway).
• British Brevity: It had eleven episodes spread over two seasons.
• Butt-Monkey: Tony. Also, quite a few of the worst-jobbers investigated over the course of the show.
• Captain Obvious: Played for laughs a few times.
  • In the Industrial Age Episode, a boiler's engine jacket about to explode, the air is full of smoke and alarm bells are clanging ... and Tony can only shout: "I THINK WE'VE PUT ENOUGH COAL IN!"
  • And again in the Maritime Age Episode:
  Tony: How come we've just got onto the boat and it's already full of water?
  Andy De-Martine: ... it leaks.
  • While sampling a bowl of worm stew prepared by a wise woman:
  Tony: There's little lumps in it.
  Jane Milner: Those are the worms.
  • Discussing the construction of Britain's lighthouses:
  Phil Griffiths: Lighthouse builders would employ a man called a 'crow' to shout out when there was a big wave coming in.
  Tony: What would he have shouted out?
  Phil Griffiths: "There's a big wave coming in!"
  • Tony, during the Castrati segment, asking about the... procedure.
  Tony: Did it hurt?
  Dr Peter Giles: [stifling laughter] I think it did.
• Career-Revealing Trait: Plenty of worst-jobbers could easily be recognized by the effect of their work on their bodies.
  • Reddlemen were stained permanently red by the ochre they peddled, and were frequently mistaken for the devil by superstitious country folk.
  • Thanks to carrying around the immensely heavy kegs of water on their backs, water caddies were recognizable by a permanent stoop.
  • Tanners were distinguished by the smell of faeces and rotting meat that surrounded them.
  • On a similar note, woad-dyers were so pungent that for a time, they were forbidden from living within London. As if that wasn't bad enough, their skin was stained blue and they even sweated blue.
  • Castrati could often be recognized even when fully clothed: quite apart from the high pitch to their voices, the lack of testosterone resulted in them sporting unusually tall, long-limbed frames without body hair.
  • "Bufferlasses" charged with buffing cutlery would end up getting the cleansing mixture of dirt and oil splattered all over their hands and faces, sometimes to the point of getting their skin impregnated with it — making it impossible to remove. Also, they stood a very good chance of getting dermatitis.
  • Matchgirls glowed as a result of the white phosphorous they used to make the matchsticks. More unpleasantly, they suffered from an industrial disease called Phossy Jaw that caused their teeth and jawbones to decay as a result of accidental ingestion of the phosphorous, leaving them treated like lepers.
  • Lead-white paint manufacturers who'd been too long on the job suffered from a unique form of brain damage that prevented them from keeping their hands outstretched and level.
• Catch-22 Dilemma: The poor fishwives of Tudor times really had it rough. In order to sell their wares, they had to shout to catch people's attention, but the problem was that Tudor folk hated anything that disrupted order, so they would have the fishwives arrested for disturbing the peace and sentence them to wear a scold's bridle or, if that didn't work, strap them to a dunking chair.
• Crapsack World: Just about every era explored tends to be defined by backbreaking labor and ruthless exploitation — either by the upper classes or by criminal elements. Jobs are often defined by filth, disease, disfiguration, low pay, terrible working conditions, thankless busywork, ludicrously disproportionate punishments for failure, the possibility of a horrible death, and in some cases, suicidal depression. Even the more glamorous eras and occupations are replete with suffering.
• Crapsaccharine World: The Georgian Era, an age of confidence and innovation in which the knowledge of human body was expanded, James Watt kickstarted the Industrial Revolution, fine art enjoyed a renaissance under Turner and Constable, Opera became widespread and hugely popular, and tea was introduced to British society. Behind the scenes, a lot of this success was based on crime, corruption and suffering: anatomists learned a lot of their knowledge from corpses stolen by the body-snatchers, the industrial innovations quickly gave way to hellish factories run by expendable child-laborers, artists exploited working-class women for use in their masterpieces, the greatest voices in Opera could only be created through a barbaric process of castration... and because of the exorbitant tax on imported items, most of the tea was illegal contraband brought in by smugglers.
• Dangerous Workplace: Quite a few of the workplaces visited or discussed during the show. The Bryant & May match factory was arguably the worst, due to the combination of No OSHA Compliance and white phosphorus.
• Darkest Hour: The very Worst jobs of the episode, reserved for the very end of each episode and concerning only the most boring, humiliating, dangerous or just plain revolting out of all the already terrible jobs reviewed: Tony's least favourite out of all of these was the Tanner — for very good reason.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance:
  • Being a nude model for artists was considered lower than prostitution for women; men, though paid little, got away with it.
  • Acting was considered just as evil, and punishable by having the offender's ears cut off.
  • Children were regularly used in situations where you needed either little hands, little bodies or just someone who would work for less.
  • Because women couldn't be musicians, castration was necessary to have vocalists with high voices — and the results were so good that people cheered for the use of the procedure to continue. Unfortunately, not only were these poor boys unable to lead normal lives, they also ran the risk of disfiguration due to the lack of hormones and infection — and said infections also ran the risk of killing the young castrati, too.
  • The use of blind or partially-sighted people as treadmill operators was considered acceptable, largely due to the fact they wouldn't notice the hundred-foot drop below them (as well as just being one of the few jobs available that a blind person could actually do).
• The Dung Ages: The Dark Ages episode, which features an in-depth examination of wattle-and-daub construction: one of the key ingredients is, somewhat unsurprisingly, manure.
• Everything's Cuter with Kittens: While discussing the Great Plague dog- and cat-killers during the Stuarts episode, Tony holds a pair of kittens who mew adorably throughout the segment. They don't teach us anything more about the job except to illustrate why Tony wouldn't want to do it.
• Failure Hero: The Riding Officers. They were supposed to police the English coasts and prevent smuggling, but thanks to a limited workforce and a lack of any fast means of communication between officers, they weren't all that effective. Worse still, because they worked alone and were usually armed with only a cutlass and a pistol, they usually ended up being horribly brutalized by the smugglers, if not killed outright; even if the riding officers managed to conduct an arrest, the smugglers would have been able to escape conviction very easily thanks to sympathizers among the local juries. To add insult to injury, the officers received about the same wage as a farm labourer.
• Groin Attack:
  • The Castrati were a natural recipient of this.
  • Coin-stampers trying to make a little extra money by clipping bits of silver off the coins were punished by castration.
  • Shepherds had to castrate male lambs. One of the few instances when the attacker is suffering almost as much as the victim: in order to prevent infections from dirty fingers, the testicles would have to be drawn out with the shepherd's mouth.
• High Turnover Rate:
  • There were plenty of people who ended up quitting their jobs after realizing the money was just not worth losing their health, and very possibly their life, over it. One of these examples was being a garden hermit during the Georgian times. You had to stay in a cave, stand at the entrance and pose for people who walked by, but you could not talk to anyone, have a vacation, shave, trim your nails, bathe, or wash your clothes, and you only got paid in full after seven years. Needless to say, most hermits ended up quitting before they got fully paid and in one case, a hermit was sacked after three weeks for getting caught drinking in a local pub.
  • And in some cases, people died before they even had a chance to quit. One such unfortunate case was the child laborers working in the factories and mills. Since there were plenty of orphans to spare, they could easily be replaced if a work accident resulted in injury or death.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: The Trope Namer is featured. Petards were essentially Stuart-era hand grenades, except they weren't thrown but rather delivered in person. Because they were so unpredictable, it was not uncommon for soldiers to be blown up while trying to deploy them, hence the expression.
• Is This Thing Still On?: Happens to Tony while he monologues at the end of the Maritime episode:
  Tony: Next time, I'll be back on terra firma, where the ground may be firmer, but the jobs are just as terrible. (Beat) That's an awful joke. I hope it doesn't stay in.
• Know When to Fold 'Em: During his investigation of the job of "Fighting Woman", Tony is told that the final bout will involve real swords. Having acquired enough bumps and bruises in the last two rounds, Tony draws the line at swordplay and literally throws in the towel.
• Make an Example of Them: Some jobs were so aggressively policed that failing usually meant suffering a particularly unpleasant punishment to deter other offenders. For example, coin-stampers found guilty of stealing their coins would be punished by having a limb amputated and nailed to the door of the workshop as a warning to other thieves. For good measure, the boss in charge of the coin stampers were also encouraged to be harsher taskmasters by ending up as the recipient of the punishment if the original offender couldn't be found.
• Mistaken For The Devil: The Reddleman, a dye merchant often stained red by his product, was a recipient of this.
• No OSHA Compliance: Played straight and subverted: it's made clear that most of the jobs examined in the show would have had very few safety precautions, especially the work of Steeplejack; Tony, however, is given as much safety equipment possible under the circumstances.
• Oh, Crap!: Commonly uttered during especially dangerous worst jobs; Guillemot Egg Collecting sees Tony deliver quite a few, particularly when he loses his shoes off the edge of the cliff.
• Precision F-Strike:
  • While playing the part of a Guillemot Egg Collector and making a very perilous climb down a cliff, an unexpected stumble makes Tony yell: "Oh, shit!"
  • Though muffled by a scold's bridle, Tony (now playing a Fishwife) can be heard telling one of the men jostling him to fuck off.
  • When asked about where the Saltepetre Men went to collect their product, Robert Smith is very frank in explaining that the best sources would have been large concentrations of "feces, urine — shit, basically."
• Professional Killer: The Tudor Executioner, undoubtedly on the "Hitman" end of the scale; unskilled, underpaid, despised by the entire community, and often Driven to Suicide.
• Purple Is Powerful:
  • The purple dye used to create the kind of clothes fit for an emperor was formulated by mixing crushed shellfish - fermented crushed shellfish. As you can imagine, the smell is horrific.
  • A similar process is made to make blue colored dye, only using fermented woad, but the smell is just as bad. In fact, the process was so smelly that Queen Elizabeth I banned woad dyers from living in cities.
• Scavenger World: Victorian London; because it produced so much rubbish, various classes of scavengers could earn semi-regular wages by finding saleable items among the waste. The Victorian episode examined a few of these kinds of scavengers, from near destitute cigarette-end collectors and Mudlarks^note  hunted the banks of the river Thames for bits of copper or coal, to the premier league examples like Bone-Gubbers^note  scavenged bones that could be sold in order to produce manure and soap, Dustmen^note  gathered ashes and dust from houses, sold for use in making bricks, and Toshers^note  roamed the sewers, looking for lost valuables, coins, and other saleable goods accidentally swept down the drain.
• Self-Deprecation: In the Elizabethan segment on acting and the perils therein, Tony reminisces about being a child actor back in the late 1950s and then calls his past self a "complete tosser".
• Throw the Dog a Bone:
  • The job of Tudour Spitboy; long, monotonous and back-straining though it was, it allowed Tony to sample some of the chickens roasting on the spit. He even said that it was his first decent experience in the entire program.
  • While not enthusiastic about the taste of Umble Pie (the medieval cook's Christmas treat), Tony remarked that it was still "the nicest thing I've smelt all day."
  • Also, after the finicky job of cooking and preparing a boar's head for Christmas dinner, he got a chance to try some of the boar meat himself.
• Too Much Information: Used in one or two situations where Tony learns far more than he intended about the jobs he was about to perform. For example, when studying the work of the Royal Food Taster, he's given a bowl of food to eat while a scientist explains what would happen if it had been laced with arsenic; Tony spends most of this discussion looking more and more horrified, and eventually asks her to stop explaining altogether when the topic of "purging" is brought up.
• Town with a Dark Secret: The Riding Officer often found himself pitted against entire villages profiting off smuggling in some way; at best, he would be met with a wall of silence, and at worst, he'd end up being assaulted by the smugglers and their allies.
• Venturous Smuggler: The natural enemy of the Riding Officer, as featured in the Georgian episode. As Tony and the consulted expert discuss, the smugglers at work in that period weren't romantic or innocent figures, but hardened criminals who would not only murder riding officers but horribly mutilate them as wall - cutting out tongues and ears and nailing them to walls as a warning to others.
• Vomit Indiscretion Shot: Used in the Christmas Special when Tony is playing the part of the Puke Collector.
• Why Did It Have to be Heights: Tony has acrophobia, and nearly every episode has a worst job that involves him either climbing or dangling off a tall building, all while being visibly terrified. Despite his fears, he only failed to complete one aerial challenge in both series: a 'flying man' acrobatic routine that had to be cancelled because the rope got soaked in a rainstorm and started to droop.

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