Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2661 in VHS
• Released on: 2000-02-07
• Rating: Parental Guidance
• Number of discs: 1
• Format: PAL
• Original language: English
• Number of tapes: 1
• Running time: 153 minutes

Synopsis
The Bower family agree to live the life of a Victorian family for three months. Out goes the television, electricity and central heating. In comes fluff and dust, corsets, Victorian cooking and strange bathing attire.

Customer Reviews

Engaging perspective of life before electricity and shampoo!
An excellent keepsake of the fabulous series on Channel 4. I bought this video to use as a teaching aid to explain life at the turn of the century (the 20th century!). The brave family who volunteered for this project truly experience the hardships and the highpoints of this life - the role of women in that society, no refrigeration, electricity, shampoo....and the corsets...oh the horror all for the sake of a bit of cleavage and a tiny waist! Of course the family experience all of this with an interesting retrospective as they know the delights of modern society. It does certainly make you think though, about why we waste so much time watching TV and eating junk food etc...we could be doing so many other things! The producers/directors of the series have captured the detail of this period house superbly - I was transported into another world. The children I teach can't believe that life was really like that - to quote one "what no Big Macs?" - say no more.

Wonderful
In this marvelous production, you follow a project of producing a true "living museum." Taking a London townhouse that existed in 1900, a host of experts are called in to return it to its original appearance, complete with gas lighting, coal burning stove, turn-of-the-century paintings, clothing, toys, soaps, etc. Then, a 1999 family (the Bowlers) is challenged to live in this house, wearing 1900 clothing using only 1900 technology, for three months. This show is presented on two VHS tapes, each containing two one-hour episodes.

I really enjoyed this show. Learning about the house and what went into it in the first episode was interesting, but much more so was watching the family's reaction to the jobs they needed to perform around the house and the limited tools they had to perform the tasks. Emotions range from the joy of parties to the frustration of the mother, when the inability to perform some everyday tasks reduces her to tears. They hire a maid (who, in 1900, would have earned four pence a day for fifteen hours of work!), and then have to deal with the situation of having a domestic.

This is a great show, being very educational and yet entertaining. There are many vignettes, where a great deal of information about life in 1900 is presented. This is a great show, and I recommend it 100%.