Claudia Winkleman has described the horrifying moment her daughter “screamed out for me” as the eight-year-old’s Halloween costume was set alight.
The Strictly Come Dancing co-host described the accident as life-changing and said she cannot even recall life before her daughter Matilda’s injuries.
Speaking to BBC consumer campaign show Watchdog about the incident, Winkleman said she had bought the costume at the local supermarket for “about five quid” and the family went out trick-or-treating.
“I was talking to somebody and then I just heard her scream,” an emotional Winkleman said. “She just screamed: ‘Mummy’ and I turned round and that was that, she was just on fire.
“Everyone was screaming. She was screaming, all the kids there were screaming. It feels like she was on fire for hours, but the surgeon said that it definitely wasn’t the case and it was probably just seconds.
“She went up, is the only way I know how to describe it... it was a spark and she screamed out for me.
“It was like those horrific birthday candles that you blow out and then they come back... it was really fast, it was fast, it wasn’t fire like I’d seen.
“We couldn’t put her out. Her tights had melted into her skin.”
The BBC One show, which airs at 8pm on Thursday, tests out high street fancy dress costumes to see how safe they are to wear.
The programme is intending to highlight the fact that costumes are classified as toys rather than clothes, meaning less rigorous health and safety standards are applied to them.
Winkleman said she had spent the months since the accident wishing she had been burned rather than her daughter. “I wish I had been dressed as the witch is mainly all I wish, that it had happened to me... she went up, and I don’t want that to happen to another child.”
Jorge Leon-Vallapalos, the plastic surgeon at London’s Chelsea and Westminster hospital who treated Matilda, called the number of child burns “a mini epidemic... in certain periods of the year” and said the law must be changed.
Winkleman added: “I would like parents to, just on Halloween, just to think about what they’re going to put their kids in because I didn’t, and it cost us.”
