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Victorian Farm
2009 · TV series · documentary · 60 min episodes · 1 season
Historical observational documentary series following a team who live the life of Victorian farmers for a year.
3 positivefrom 3 commenters
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4 comments on Hacker News
Great show. If you liked it, Ruth Goodman and Peter Ginn has made several shows together along with another archeologist, Alex Langlands, which I think are even better.
Of these, I think my favourite is Victorian Farm (2009), where the gang has to bring a real Victorian-era farm back into working order and then live like the Victorian farmers did. Unlike the castle show, it benefits from the gang having to research and learn the old ways on their own, whereas the castle is a big project where they're being taught or directed by the crew who's already working there.
The other shows — Tudor Monastery Farm, Edwardian Farm, Wartime Farm, Tales from the Green Valley, etc. — are all thoroughly excellent.
A minor point, but Goodman is not an archeologist or historian, but she's very good!
There is an excellent documentary series about it, Secrets of the Castle [1], with historian Ruth Goodman and archeologist Peter Ginn taking part in the building and upkeep. Very old-fashioned but highly rewarding stuff, as are all their series, such as Victorian Farm.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secrets_of_the_Castle
I guess a lot of people must be using YouTube in a different way to how we do. We do allow our 8-year-old to sometimes watch YouTube, after the homework is finished or if sick.
What does he watch? Things like....
* 40-50 year old Russian language cartoons, to help with his language learning.
* Quite a few British shows like Edwardian Farm[1], Victorian Farm[2] and Wartime Farm. Pretty educational stuff.
* Documentaries about stuff he's interested in. At one point it was Nelson's flagship, HMS Victory, another time it was the Cutty Sark[3]. He went through a real tall ships period. We followed this up last summer by visiting both the Victory in Portsmouth and the Cutty Sark in London. It was amazing the way he was able to point things out on the real ships, because he'd watched the documentaries.
* Ski racing. He's mad for it. Races himself on weekends and obsesses with who is winning the World Cup races. Mikaela Shiffrin hitting the record was a big moment.
We never see any adverts on there. I don't know why, maybe something to do with a combination of uBlock Origin and Linux.
We do have a Netflix subscription, because I enjoy watching a few shows on there, but we've never watched anything in the Kids section, because it's 95% crap.
So from our perspective, YouTube is quite a reasonable educational tool, when used under supervision and in moderation.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwardian_Farm
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victorian_Farm
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutty_Sark
For anyone interested in this subject, the BBC produced a great miniseries called Victorian Farm in which three historians worked on (and lived at) a farm using authentic 19th century tools and techniques. The highlight of the show for me were the frequent artisans and skilled tradespeople who would visit the farm to demonstrate these types of skills. None of the people profiled in this article would be out of place among the guests they had.