Documentary series turns television into smellyvision with scratch & sniff cards

New documentary series Filthy Cities will turn television into smellyvision with scratch and sniff cards. The three-part BBC2 show, starting at 9pm on Tuesday, charts the sanitary history of London, Paris and New York with the whiffs brought to life by the cards you can get from your local library.

Here presenter Dan Snow dishes the dirt... Filthy Cities is a pretty revolutionary series. We're very lucky to be given the chance to use this new technique.



Hopefully everyone will get their Scratch and sniff cards and play along. The smells are realistic and it's a fun way to watch TV. Smell is such a wonderful sense. Ever since our childhood, a waft of a smell can bring back memories and emotions.

To be able to trigger that at home through a television show is very exciting. I was involved in making the smells for the card. Among them is a sewer and an 18th Century tannery. The worst, the sewer, is unimaginably bad. It smells of rotting corpses. Another one, for Marie Antoinette's perfume, is rather nice.