Claudia Winkleman has urged parents to buy safe Halloween costumes for their children and has opened up about the ordeal of watching her daughter go up in flames when her costume caught fire two years ago.
The Strictly Come Dancing presenter’s then eight-year-old daughter Matilda suffered third-degree burns over much of her body after her supermarket-bought witch’s costume caught fire from a candle in a pumpkin in Halloween of 2014.
Writing a column for The Sunday Times Style Magazine, Winkleman said she “hated” Halloween and encouraged parents to check their children’s outfits matched British nightwear flammability standards. She said she did want anyone to be forced to endure what she went through.
“Can I be boring before you do (yup, even duller than usual) and ask you to buy a fancy-dress costume that meets the British nightwear flammability standard (BS5722 Test 3),” she wrote.
“I know it’s annoying to check and it hardly trips off the tongue, but always just ask, they’ll tell you immediately if it has passed.”
“I don’t like Halloween because two years ago it turned out our screams were real. Thanks to the extraordinary NHS everything is now OK. I just don’t want any of you to go through what we did. So, get yourself a witchy costume, but please get a safe one.”
Winkleman quipped that while she had “tried to cancel” Halloween celebrations, it had turned out to be “overly ambitious”. She said she was not a fan of Halloween as a whole and noted celebrations appeared to get more overblown each year.
After Winkleman’s daughter's accident, she spoke to BBC’s Watchdog about the horror of the accident.
“I was talking to somebody, and then I just heard her scream. She just screamed 'Mummy' and I turned round and that was that, she was just on fire,” she said. “Everyone was screaming. She was screaming, all the kids there were screaming… She went up, is the only way I know how to describe it. It was not like fire I had seen before.”
Referring to just how serious her daughter's burns were, she added: “It's life-changing but not life-defining. It was definitely life-changing for me.”
