I just saw the first episode of the 1940’s house-about a London family who are going to experience life in wartime GB. Looks promising, except that the old lady is one of the whineyest woman I’ve ever seen.
The house looks pretty good-but I am surprised that most Brits didn’t have central heating by 1940! Lugging coal upstairs musn’t have been much fun, and cleaning out the ashes worse!
What particularly interested me: they found an old lady who had actually been an air raid warden in 1939-and she told them all about the blackouts (you had to cover all of your windows at night, or risk a fine). My question: since the German Luftwaffe was using radio direction-finding to drop their bombs, was the “blackout” really that effective?
I also liked the home-made bomb shelter in the backyard-it looked like it had a lot of leaks!
The showlooks pretty good-I just wish the BBC would do a Roman-Britain show-like AD300 House!
They showed all three episodes of 1940s house on my local PBS station last night.
Overall, I think this was the best of the non-commercial reality shows (1900s house, Pioneer house, 1940s house). I wish there were more episodes! It really brought to life how difficult things were in war era Britain. And, despite the first episode, the people on 1940s house turned out to be the least whiney. By the mid-second episode, you heard them saying things like “Life here is bad, but at least I’m not in a trench getting shot at.” and really showing a good attitude towards working their asses off to support the war effort.
I also like the idea of AD300 house! Do it!
Did the Luftwaffe make that much use of RDF? Even if they did, I assume it wasn’t accurate enough to be foolproof; blackouts just add a layer of protection by keeping things better hidden.
I caught bits and pieces. Why do they pick the whiniest people to do these shows? I was amazed at how bad they were at cooking and stretching out a meal. Hard to believe that gene died out in one generation. Yes, I would pick up all the flour and peaches that fell on the floor, dust it off and pick out the nasties - you’d eat it straight off the floor if you were starving.
The BBC did do a program about people living in a Stoneage Village. Now these people did whine. They gave themselves food poisoning in a week due to poor food preparation.
Missed how it all turned out though
BTW wasn’t 1940’s house a Channel 4 prog. and not a BBC one?
Done… BBC did a “Life in the Iron Age” program where severeal families attempted to live several weeks in a celtic Iron age villiage as a tribe.
Too many conflicts as some people were unwilling to do the work and the elected leader wasn’t strong enough to get them going. They did managed to smelt their own iron though.
Ahhh Iron Age not Stone Age.
What I found interesting as I watched the 1940’s House:
Here we sit, in a pre-war situation ourselves, whinging and whining and complaining about how our civil liberties and rights are being eroded away. Probably the most complaining I hear tends to be about long lines to get through security at airports. None of us, that I’m aware of, are really making many personal sacrifices to support the war effort.
Then I saw the sacrifices the Brits had to make in WWII, and realized that there was rationing in the US and people here also had to do the same thing. Everyone seemed to cheerfully go about doing their part toward the war effort, but 60 years later, if you make us wait in line an hour to get on a plane, we’re picketing and crying about our eroding rights. It’s because there are no bombs dropping around our neighborhoods. Yet.
We’re a bunch of babies who have no idea how to make a personal sacrifice toward the common good. So much has changed culturally since then, and the current situation is so entirely different politically, I can’t see how we could ever be expected to make those same kinds of sacrifices over Iraq.
Food for thought.
If you enjoyed 1940s House, as I did, you may like the 1987 movie Hope and Glory, a fictional account of a similar family in the London suburbs during wartime.
Re. Luftwaffe tactics/blackout, the people behind the blackout policy weren’t to know what location finding methods the Luftwaffe would use - everybody was issued with a gas mask too because mustard gas had been used during WWI. From listening to German pilots being interviewd it seems their methods were pretty primitive at least some of the time.
You’re right, it was a Channel 4 programme, but BBC America shows plenty of C4 output, so I can see how the confusion might arise.
Here is the States we,ve only been privvy to 1940’s house which will air soon here in Toledo (PBS WGTE CH 30) soon, and 1900 House which aired better than 2 years ago. We also had our own, Frontier House which I hope you all got the privlage of viewing.
Whineyness aside, I love the families they pick for these shows! They all have the amalgamation of strangers on “Survivor” and it’s clones beat in the dust. As the ad for 1940’s house states"Another opportunity for family bonding" The family interaction is much more entertaining to watch than a bunch of folks struggling to get to know one another, who also, chances are will never see each other again afterwards.
What I can’t figgure out is why would they put families in situations someone still may be alive that remembers what it was like? I realise it’s still a good show, but it seems a bit lame. But then again it won’t keep me from watching!
Great suggestion on the Roman house. My question is who’d run the vomitorium?
Another suggestion. Put western famlies in the far east, The combination of out of time and out of culture would be amusing to say the least…
Keep up the good work Ch.4 We love you here in the states!
Our PBS station also ran all three episodes in a row. We watched the first two and have the third on tape. It’s great. Very informative.
I wasn’t bothered too much by the whinyness. A period of adjustment is to be expected. Plus, this family is experiencing the war in a very compressed time. In the real 1940, housewives had a while to get used to the food rationing before the system was changed.
For episode two:
I was really impressed by the eldest son’s job as fuel warden. I was glad they gave him something to do and he handled it so well.
By 1940, Britain had been at war for a year, and the Royal navy had been stretched thin , trying to protect the merchant ships that supplied GB’s food imports. So, the government instituted food rationing, and many types of food were simply unobtainable. My question: was GB able (by putting marginal land into production) able to reach self-sufficiency in food? I would think that a country the size of England would be able to grow enough potatoes and wheat to feed the population. In any event, when did food rationing end? Did a big black market in food develop? In the US the mafia started printing counterfeit ration cards, particularly for gasoline. However, my dad informs me that gasoline rationing (in the US) was enacted to conserve the rubber supply-there was no shortage of oil and gasoline.
One other question (for you Brits): in 1940, England began to worry that the germans would attempt an invasion. Parliament passed a law that siad that if a car or truck was to be parked for more than 6 hours, the driver was required to remove the distributor rotor (so the vehicle couldnot be moved): how was this supposed to deter the german invaders?
Yes, all farmable land was put into use as far as possible and Britain did become largely self-sufficient. Women in particular were able to make a major contribution to the war effort by taking jobs as Land Girls - town dwellers who replaced male labour on the farms. A popular slogan on posters at the time was Dig For Victory - everybody was expected to grow crops in their gardens or any suitable land they had access to.
It has even been suggested that Britain’s diet during the War was better than it had been immediately prior, because people ate more fresh fruit and vegetables. In the post-War period, rationing was extended to allow public spending to be prioritised in other areas. Food rationing was only gradually phased out, finally ending in 1954.
There was a black market in practically everything. Running a search on “spiv” might help you here becase that was the nickname given to the shady guys who could “get hold of” stuff that was in short supply.
The idea behind disabling cars was to prevent paratroopers from stealing them, and so to reduce their potential mobility as much as possible. Naturally a full-scale motorised invasion would have had its own transport, but the idea was that every little would help.
BTW, perhaps the most popular of all the “house” series was the Edwardian Country House, in which the volunteers were divided into a wealthy family and their servants. Keep an eye out for it.
Yes, all farmable land was put into use as far as possible and Britain did become largely self-sufficient. Women in particular were able to make a major contribution to the war effort by taking jobs as Land Girls - town dwellers who replaced male labour on the farms. A popular slogan on posters at the time was Dig For Victory - everybody was expected to grow crops in their gardens or any suitable land they had access to.
It has even been suggested that Britain’s diet during the War was better than it had been immediately prior, because people ate more fresh fruit and vegetables. In the post-War period, rationing was extended to allow public spending to be prioritised in other areas. Food rationing was only gradually phased out, finally ending in 1954.
There was a black market in practically everything. Running a search on “spiv” might help you here becase that was the nickname given to the shady guys who could “get hold of” stuff that was in short supply.
The idea behind disabling cars was to prevent paratroopers from stealing them, and so to reduce their potential mobility as much as possible. Naturally a full-scale motorised invasion would have had its own transport, but the idea was that every little would help.
BTW, perhaps the most popular of all the “house” series was the Edwardian Country House, in which the volunteers were divided into a wealthy family and their servants. Keep an eye out for it.
People are more whiny today? We only think that because we forget the bad stuff about the past and remember the good - if you REALLY want to know what was going on, listen to old-time radio broadcasts from that period. I just finished listening to broadcasts of “Fibber McGee & Molly” from just before the attack on Pearl Harbor to after V-J day, and there are a lot of references to people hoarding, huge labor strikes and war time crooks and gyp artists, plus whining about gas rationing, meatless Tuesdays, shortages of essentials, additional taxes, etc, and along with this there were appeals to do your share, pull together and tough it out. Apparantly there was a LOT of of griping going on during the war. People and human nature DO NOT CHANGE - they were the same then as we are now - we just put on rose-colored glasses when we look at the past.
Things they could have done:
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Have Dad ‘die’ in an air raid. I know it would have really put a lot of stress on the family, but Dad’s died in WWII so it would have been interesting to see what would happen.
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Send the kids to Canada.
Not a bad thing with 2 less mouths to feed. -
Tell the family the ship was torpedoed that had their kids.
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Have ‘relatives’ show up to live with them when their house is destroyed by a bomb. Then you’d have 9 or 10 people cramped in that small house.
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Have 2 U.S. soldiers move in with them. I don’t think this really happened in WWII, though.
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Capture a Luftwaffe pilot that has parachuted in their back yard.
(like “HOPE AND GLORY”)
Another thing - I wonder if they ever regretted selling off the rabbits? They never mentioned them again, but I’m guessing that when they started to get really hungry they might really have wanted some o’ those bunnies.
I checked out the link and took the “Are You a Snob?” quiz. It was hard, because I had to guess at a fair number of English slang or pop culture references. Still I managed to score a 67% Snob rating.
Re: Historic Reality Shows
One of the Canadian cable networks (Life?) put out a great series set in Manitoba during the 1870s. It was called Pioneer Quest
http://www.telefilm.gc.ca/data/production/prod_611.asp?c=2&gr=DOC
There were two couples who had to live for a whole year in houses they constructed. It was a year of miserable weather, but they toughed it out. A great show.