Larvatus Prodeo

While the format of Electric Dreams is now thoroughly familiar – a modern-day family is placed in a facsimile of some past historical era, and their reactions to it recorded for the camera, this BBC reality show (screening early on Sunday evenings on Channel Ten for the next two weeks) is somewhat unusual in its choice of historical eras to recreate. Rather than settler households, or the travails of Victorian-era aristocracy, this show recreates the recent past and concentrates on the progression of domestic technology. Each episode concentrates on a decade, with the first episode (screening last night) setting the participating family up in a “1970s house”. Each day, the “clock” was advanced one year, and new gadgets were delivered to the house, roughly corresponding to the median British household of the year.

At one level, this show, both for the (adult) participants and for much of the audience, is an exercise in geeky nostalgia, with the theme tune from Pot Black, Pong, and a beautifully-restored but still awful to drive Ford Cortina making appearances. But, to give the producers credit, they’ve very much tried to place the technology in its social context as much as possible. There’s a power outage, caused by “a miners’ strike”. Contrary to popular belief, the children actually spend less time interacting with their parents in the “1970s”, particularly as their mother battles the lack of kitchen facilities. And it rapidly becomes clear just how limited home entertainment options were in this relatively recent era – particularly in a drab English winter.

But, entertaining as the show was – and as a child of the 1980s I can’t wait to see the next episode – the format has inherent limitations. The impacts of domestic technology – the gadgets and gizmos we personally interact with – are very real. But invisible technology makes a great deal of difference too; not least of which because it made us materially better-off over that period (in Britain and Australia, if not the United States). The effect of incomes can’t really be dealt with particularly well here – by the end of the show’s timeline, the middle-class family depicted would have reduced their cooking efforts even more; not through any particular piece of technology, but because they could afford to eat out a lot more often.

But it is what it is, and, amongst other questions, it will be interesting to see if the participants identify any particular technology as having the most impact over the eras depicted on the show. The mobile phone, perhaps?