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quinaraI just watched Electric Dreams on BBC iPlayer - a family's house is transformed into a house from 1970 (ie. with all the technology taken away, but the décor's changed as well) and they then live as though every day is another year going forward. (So they spend ten days in their 70s house.) The next programme will be the 1980s and then the 90s is coming after that.
I'm not really into all these 'families transported through time' programmes, because I never feel like they really work. But this one did. It might just have been Robert Llewellyn doing the voice-over, but I think part of it was that it was their house, remodelled (rooms made smaller, en-suite bathroom blocked-off, central heating not on in winter until 1975, ie. when 50% of homes had it). I'm not ashamed to say that I was also really happy to see that the 'computer geek' on the tech support team was a woman, who didn't fit any geeky stereotype whatsoever, despite the way she was clearly in geek heaven explaining the Sinclair calculator.
I wasn't alive in the 70s, nor the 80s really, but it was interesting seeing the stuff that there would be vestiges of in the 90s - the stuff that really made me feel like there was a generation gap between me and the children on the programme. I mean, what defines a generation gap? The fact that the preview of next week had all the children sneering at VHS?
Anyway, the advent of cassette tapes and the art of the mixtape, that was weird in the way it was presented as 'lost'. We had loads of mixtapes! Mum made them for the car when we went on holiday. Once in France we had two, but we left one on the dashboard and it melted so were left with only one... The idea that the 13-year-old boy had never played with records felt odd.
Equally the 'family evenings' round the TV. This was definitely a vestige thing, but the programming of snooker (heh, black and white snooker), The Generation Game and random Open University obscurities was familiar from the old Saturday evening line-up. TV, I remember, could be so dull and yet you'd watch it anyway. Half of it was 70s repeats as it was. Though it wasn't actually home telly-watching that this programme reminded me of most, but what would happen when we went to visit my relatives in the Midlands. There, where it wasn't our house (so we didn't have any 'technology' or stuff of our own to entertain us), we could easily spend entire days watching the TV (basically like the Royle family) all squidged up on the sofa. And it was never interesting, but just loud enough to distract you from your book. And like the 70s house, my grandparents' house was cold outside the living room with its electric heater. My brother, my cousins and I had good fun LARPing (as I realise now it was) around the house with my brother's role-playing books, but if you weren't in the living room you had to stay quite active.
Possibly the main thing that struck me, though, apart from the almost forced collapse of the mother into the housewife's role, was how expensive everything was. My mum's told me, of course, about the price of TVs (and I've seen it even in the last ten years) - my grandpa (not in the Midlands) still rents his TV (and so gets it upgraded randomly every now and then, much to his amusement). But the idea that, as I think it said, a teasmade cost a week's salary? It seems bizarre.
But then I do think our/my perception of price has got weird, as far as technology's concerned. I noticed it when I bought the Dollhouse DVD. It was £15 on Amazon, though I ended up getting it in HMV for £18 (because I wanted it then and there and am apparently odd), and I remember thinking 'hmm, that seems quite expensive, maybe I should wait until it's a tenner'. But I know for a fact that Buffy video boxsets back in the day were £35 for half a season in Virgin - HMV, I think, was even more. Granted, my brother and I didn't buy them apart from when they were on 2for1, which happened quite often, but they didn't have any of the features of the DVDs and the quality really wasn't the same. (Though part of that could have been our knackered old video player, which I swear would take about ten minutes to rewind/fastforward through 3 hours of tape.) In food/clothes etc. £15 won't buy you nearly as much today as it did in 2000. Especially in ice-cream. I don't know what to think about that. The internet culture of free? Has it affected me that much?
Anyway, looking forward to the 80s next week!
I'm not really into all these 'families transported through time' programmes, because I never feel like they really work. But this one did. It might just have been Robert Llewellyn doing the voice-over, but I think part of it was that it was their house, remodelled (rooms made smaller, en-suite bathroom blocked-off, central heating not on in winter until 1975, ie. when 50% of homes had it). I'm not ashamed to say that I was also really happy to see that the 'computer geek' on the tech support team was a woman, who didn't fit any geeky stereotype whatsoever, despite the way she was clearly in geek heaven explaining the Sinclair calculator.
I wasn't alive in the 70s, nor the 80s really, but it was interesting seeing the stuff that there would be vestiges of in the 90s - the stuff that really made me feel like there was a generation gap between me and the children on the programme. I mean, what defines a generation gap? The fact that the preview of next week had all the children sneering at VHS?
Anyway, the advent of cassette tapes and the art of the mixtape, that was weird in the way it was presented as 'lost'. We had loads of mixtapes! Mum made them for the car when we went on holiday. Once in France we had two, but we left one on the dashboard and it melted so were left with only one... The idea that the 13-year-old boy had never played with records felt odd.
Equally the 'family evenings' round the TV. This was definitely a vestige thing, but the programming of snooker (heh, black and white snooker), The Generation Game and random Open University obscurities was familiar from the old Saturday evening line-up. TV, I remember, could be so dull and yet you'd watch it anyway. Half of it was 70s repeats as it was. Though it wasn't actually home telly-watching that this programme reminded me of most, but what would happen when we went to visit my relatives in the Midlands. There, where it wasn't our house (so we didn't have any 'technology' or stuff of our own to entertain us), we could easily spend entire days watching the TV (basically like the Royle family) all squidged up on the sofa. And it was never interesting, but just loud enough to distract you from your book. And like the 70s house, my grandparents' house was cold outside the living room with its electric heater. My brother, my cousins and I had good fun LARPing (as I realise now it was) around the house with my brother's role-playing books, but if you weren't in the living room you had to stay quite active.
Possibly the main thing that struck me, though, apart from the almost forced collapse of the mother into the housewife's role, was how expensive everything was. My mum's told me, of course, about the price of TVs (and I've seen it even in the last ten years) - my grandpa (not in the Midlands) still rents his TV (and so gets it upgraded randomly every now and then, much to his amusement). But the idea that, as I think it said, a teasmade cost a week's salary? It seems bizarre.
But then I do think our/my perception of price has got weird, as far as technology's concerned. I noticed it when I bought the Dollhouse DVD. It was £15 on Amazon, though I ended up getting it in HMV for £18 (because I wanted it then and there and am apparently odd), and I remember thinking 'hmm, that seems quite expensive, maybe I should wait until it's a tenner'. But I know for a fact that Buffy video boxsets back in the day were £35 for half a season in Virgin - HMV, I think, was even more. Granted, my brother and I didn't buy them apart from when they were on 2for1, which happened quite often, but they didn't have any of the features of the DVDs and the quality really wasn't the same. (Though part of that could have been our knackered old video player, which I swear would take about ten minutes to rewind/fastforward through 3 hours of tape.) In food/clothes etc. £15 won't buy you nearly as much today as it did in 2000. Especially in ice-cream. I don't know what to think about that. The internet culture of free? Has it affected me that much?
Anyway, looking forward to the 80s next week!