Mark Andrews: Prepping for coronavirus? Think I'd rather duck and cover

Angela has been in the spotlight this week after revealing on social media her somewhat belt-and-braces approach to the coronavirus outbreak.

She is what is known as a corona-prepper, and has turned her home into a makeshift bunker should she and her family be forced into quarantine.

In a single online order, Angela bought 45 cans of tinned meat, 25 cans of fruit, 50 tins of vegetables, plus an extra 17 cans of beans and chickpeas.

Plus 15 bags of rice, eight bags of porridge, five jars of honey, five bottles of anti-bacterial soap, a giant box of laundry detergent and an extra-large pack of toilet rolls. She reckons it took her three hours to place her order, which came to a total of £136.

It seems she is not alone. Many retailers have now sold out of personal face masks, while protective body suits have been flying off the shelves of the internet retailers.

I guess some people just enjoy that sort of thing. It's like those people who back in the 70s were diligently stocking their pantries in anticipation of nuclear annihilation, and who pored over every word of the Government's Protect and Survive pamphlet on what to do when the missiles came raining down.

Back then, of course, government officials seemed to take great delight in frightening the living daylights out of everyone, particularly children, with their gruesome public information films.

Barely a day went by in the school holidays without some terrifying broadcast about youngsters going up in flames for flying a kite next to an electric pylon, retrieving a frisbee from a sub-station or catching the mast of a giant yacht on overhead cables.

Which, of course, was what all teenagers in the Midlands spent their February half-term doing.

Every episode of the Famous Five or Graham's Gang seemed to be preceded by the doll that got scalped on the escalator, or that horrible road safety advert where the mother smashed a box of eggs on the road as her child was knocked down by a car.

Of course, it wasn't just children's TV that was targeted with this sort of stuff.

There was the bloke who was thrown across his garage after using matchstalks to connect his electric drill to the mains. And those clunk-click seat-belt films, where the dippy Mrs Blunders caused mayhem in her red Austin 1100, invariably causing somebody's head to fly through their windscreen in slow motion.

There were the endless variety of chip-pan fire scenarios, the man slipping on an insecure rug, the bogus gas board officials lying in wait for an old-age pensioner to fleece, with the warning that 'not all burglars look like Bill Sykes'.

Who I used to get confused with Eric Sykes, posing the question of whether Hattie Jacques was also someone to be feared.

If that wasn't enough, a few years later the BBC made that terrifying QED documentary, which simulated the effects of a nuclear attack on London, and basically concluded that Protect and Survive was a waste of time, and that we would be burned alive whatever we did.

By that time, there were also those newspaper adverts for smoke alarms, featuring a picture of badly burned teddy bear. Even the security cameras in Woolworth's gave me the willies – remember those huge revolving black drums with flashing red lights, that looked like upturned Daleks?

And to that backdrop, a few weeks in self-isolation sounds like a walk in the park.

But back to Angela and her fellow preppers.

What strikes me is how wholesome and sensible all their preparations are. Beans and lentils, white rice, tinned fruit. If I were forced to spend a month cooped up at home wearing a mask like Dick Turpin and a bodysuit like Ali G, I would at least want one or two things I could actually enjoy.

Like 120 bottles of beer and a large crate of champagne, a lorry load of pork scratchings, 20 fillet steaks, and 60 large boxes of Maltesers.

Plus, I suppose, a large quantity of frozen oven chips. Not because they taste that good, and not because they would be practical. But because, even after all these years, I'm still scared of chip-pan fires.