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The 1940s House
2001 · TV series · 45 min episodes · 1 season
The 1940s House is a British historical reality television programme made by Wall to Wall/Channel 4 in 2001 about a modern family that tries to the live as a typical middle-class family in London during The Blitz of World War II. It was shown on Channel 4 in the United Kingdom in 2001, and in 2002 on PBS in the United States and ABC Television in Australia. It also aired on TVNZ in New Zealand. The series was narrated in the UK by Geoffrey Palmer.
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The best accounting I've seen of how much work people did historically were the mini-series that were aired on PBS a few years back: "Frontier House", "Colonial House", "Texas Ranch House", "1900 House", "The 1940s House", "The 1900 Island", "Prairie House", etc. Average modern families took up residence in a building of the times and had to use only the tools of the day to work as they did then. (Though they didn't have to grow their own food.)
Without exception, the work was backbreaking and unrelenting. Some of the moderns chose to quit rather than finish the month-long 'experiment'. Everyone came away with aspects of shell shock in realizing how hard life was back then for the average person, even just 70 years ago. It also became obvious that the lives of slaves or those working with only hand tools were that much harder still.
No, it's just insane to imagine that anyone in the past had easy lives. Nasty, brutish, and short, indubitably.
Fascinating to see how hard our recent ancestors had it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_1900_House