To light the blue touch paper and retire is to set some dramatic or risky action going and then step well back, because what happens next is out of your hands. It is used both literally, about fireworks, and figuratively, about starting an argument, a scheme or a piece of news that is bound to cause a stir. The figurative sense usually carries a wry awareness that the thing just set off might blow up, in one sense or another, and that the sensible thing to do now is get out of the way.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘light the blue touch paper and retire’?
The phrase comes directly from firework packaging. Touch-paper is paper treated with potassium nitrate so that it burns slowly rather than flaring up, which makes it suitable as a fuse. Manufacturers printed instructions on their fireworks telling the person lighting them exactly what to do and then to get clear, and “light the blue touch-paper and retire” became the standard wording of that warning on fireworks from the late nineteenth century onwards.
One of the earliest documented instances of the instruction being used appears in an 1897 report in The Standard, covering a court case about an injury caused by a firework called a “volcano”. The report quoted the manufacturer’s guidance that the firework should be tied to a post rather than held, and that “when a light had been applied to the blue touch-paper the person attending to it should retire.” A similar formula turns up in instructions for “maroons”, fireworks built to imitate the sound of cannon fire, where firers were told to “light the blue touch-paper, and stand clear immediately.” This shows the wording was general safety language used across different types of firework, not something tied to one product or brand.
The phrase is sometimes linked to the comedian Arthur Askey and his radio programme Band Waggon, as though he had made it his own catchphrase. No supporting evidence for that specific use has been found, which suggests the association with Askey is a mistaken memory rather than fact, and that the line was simply well known firework-label language that later moved into general figurative use for setting off any volatile situation.