Okay, so a while back I picked up a link from MetaFilter comments

[conuly]

Back in Time for Dinner, which is a series of hour-long episodes featuring an English family eating their way to the present from the 1950s, one year a day.

It's worth watching.

Things I noticed:

1. The 1950s kitchen appears to have a measuring cup! From all the talk talk talk about how annoying it is to convert American recipes I assumed measuring cups had fallen out of favor in England a lot earlier than 1950.

2. This is how you use that style can opener. I looked at it and went "Nope", but - unlike my counterparts in the 1950s - I can google that sort of thing.

3. The mom in this family really got a raw deal. The kids and dad could leave the house every day to go to school and work, and her 1950s counterpart would have had other housewives to talk to, but she was really stuck.

4. Loving the clothes, though, especially that purple apron. Also, I noticed around when the girls switched from pigtails to ponytails, the kids' clothing seemed to modernize a lot faster than the grown-up clothing. Which of course makes sense - your kids can't wear what they wore 10 years ago, but you can, and even if you make careful use of hand-me-downs the clothes children wear doesn't actually last forever.

5. Is it okay in England to use the flag as a tablecloth? Was it okay in the 50s? In the US it's definitely a violation of the Flag Code, and even I think it's a little tacky (and I definitely don't revere the flag or anything like that!)

6. What's with the shelf between the burners and the oven on her stove?

7. For all her talk about how if she'd married a GI and been a war bride she'd at least have an electric mixer, she may be wrong. I grew up with a rotary eggbeater as our only way to beat anything - actually, we have one now. Both our electric beaters broke, and we were tired of using a spoon or a whisk.

Comments

[conuly]

And in the last few episodes, it looked like the kids were wearing school uniforms.

So what I think must have happened is this. They started filming the last week of school, kept it up through the summer - which is a minimum of 50 days, assuming no breaks as they redo the kitchen - and finished right as school started up again. Except the only way that *really* works is if they did take breaks, or else the schedule is too tight.

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

They must have taken at least one, more likely two days to refurbish the kitchen and living-room. In the series, it looks like everything is happening back-to-back, but that isn't really feasible. (Well, perhaps they did the redecorating while the family was doing the picnic/trip to a restaurant/whatever? But it's a huge amount of work, I doubt it would be doable within a few hours.)

[conuly]

So now we're moving from 50 days (seven weeks) to 60 days (nearly nine weeks), which is more than enough time for it to have started and then ended while the kids were in school.

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

Yup!

[eofs.livejournal.com]

Fair point. School holidays are only 6 weeks long, so it could easily have straddled them.

I didn't see the first episode so I didn't know about the party at school.

Either way I think it is certainly true that in that era it was still common for women to stop working when they married, or especially when they had children. I'm sure the programme did go into the intertwined rise of the fridge/freezer and the entry of women into the workforce.