Back in Time for the Weekend, BBC2: Watch the Ashby Hawkins family in a blast from the past across five decades

This new pre-weekend treat starts by transporting us back to the 50s
Modern family: The Ashby Hawkins' try out their new roles in the 50s
BBC / Wall to Wall / Duncan Stingemore
Laura Rutkowski2 February 2016

Where Back in Time for Dinner covered food throughout the decades, Back in Time for the Weekend is tackling how we spend our free time, starting with the “thrift and formality” of the 50s.

Over the course of a summer, the programme follows the Ashby Hawkins family as they revamp their lives and their home to experience a different decade each week.

The Family Expenditure Survey, a government study conducted from the 50s until 1999, acts as the family’s blueprint across the six weeks with its indicative spending records.

The Ashby Hawkins’ are a modern family in every sense of the word. Steph is the breadwinner and works as an IT consultant. Meanwhile, her husband Rob takes care of the cooking, cleaning, and the kids (12-year-old Seth and 16-year-old Daisy).

In a role reversal for Steph and Rob, she’s expected to be a domestic goddess, while he tries his hand at DIY.

As Seth struggles with his new form of entertainment, a puzzle, he tells Steph, “You grew up on the jigsaws; you didn’t have an iPhone.” In itself, this statement is worrying, because it implicates a wider issue: an overdependence on technology to cure us of our boredom.

The host, Giles Coren, also alludes to this. He ensures that all of the family’s electronic devices are taken away, a process he likens to that practiced by prisons.

Steph previously expressed her joy at ridding her family of technology: “When we don’t have the devices getting in the way, we might actually have to talk and listen a bit more.”

Daisy receives a ballroom dancing lesson with Angela Rippon. When Daisy’s boyfriend visits her at home and she suggests dancing, he doesn’t have a clue how to lead. This is a further testament to losing sight of the simpler pleasures in life, because we’re too busy spending it in front of a screen.

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Back in Time for the Weekend raises the question of how on earth did people live back in the 50s? The better question we might ask ourselves is when did we allow our attention spans to become so short and our capacity for pure entertainment to diminish?

BBC2, 8pm

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