We are hooked on a BBC2 historical food programme. Or maybe it should be described as a reenactment. Or a reinvention of reality TV. It is called Back in Time for Dinner. The fact that it was on totally passed us by until half way through the series, but in these modern times we have been catching up on the iPlayer.
A family are eating their way through British food culture since the 1950s, at the scale of one day per year, while the ground floor of their house is redecorated in the style of each decade, complete with historic kitchen appliances and going to the lengths of blanking off the kitchen extension for the 1950s because the room wouldn't have been that large then. Clothes, cars and music of the period complete the atmosphere. Giles Coren presents, popping up periodically in between leaving the family to their own devices, Mary Berry and a hairy biker make guest appearances, and there is a food historian on hand. The family themselves are delightful, funny and reflective by turns.
The format allows scope for plenty of date driven jokes, along the line of the bread being mouldy but they've had it since 1962, and there is some slapstick action with some of the vintage kitchen equipment. First prize must go to their efforts to open a tin of pilchards (though at least they did get their pilchards eventually rather than beating the tin to a shape so horrible and misshapen that they threw it in the Thames). But the real draw is the social history.
When did smoky bacon flavour crisps first enter British food culture? And who knew that people used to go out to dinner at the first motorway service stations, which were regarded as glamorous destinations but were not given licences to serve alcohol, even though there was no drink-driving legislation at the time? Episode one on the 1950s felt like history. Well, it was before our time. We began to recognise bits of the 1960s, and as for the 1970s, those brown and orange storage canisters, that checked orange and brown furnishing fabric, the visits to the freezer centre. Space hoppers. Power cuts. OK, it was a bit more long winded than simply nibbling a madeleine, but we were off down memory lane like bloodhounds on the trail of a packet of sausages. I can't wait for the 1980s from the trailer, those rubic cubes and the bright red handles on all the kitchen cupboards take me straight back to the Swiss Cottage branch of Habitat.
I love food history. Partly, I like food, but how and what people cook and eat says so much about how they live and how they relate to each other and what their values are and how their country's economy is doing. And food history covering the second half of the twentieth century rather than the Victorian era or the Tudor kitchen allows us to calibrate our own experiences against the general trend. I think that by the mid 1970s my mother was doing more cooking from scratch than the average, despite have a full time university lecturer's post. The Systems Administrator was not allowed to have Angel Delight at home, poor mite. Since starting to watch Back in time for Dinner we've been trying to date our own culinary habits, and come to the conclusion that we are quite old fashioned. We both like corned beef hash, but possess no cookery books by Yotam Ottolenghi.
You have eleven days to catch part one, and presumably longer to watch the later episodes. It's worth watching. Apart from Wolf Hall, it's the only thing on TV all year that I've liked so much I've been actively looking forward to the next episode.
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