Review: Electric Dreams – The Seventies (TV – BBC4)
Author: Tigervamp | Date: September 29, 2009
The Sullivan-Barnes family are sent back in time to experience a life of technological advancements through the Seventies, Eighties, and Nineties. Before you run outside to scream at the top of your voice that we have finally cracked time travel I would like to point out that the family didn’t actually go back in time. Technology is not the only thing which changes in each episode as the family wear clothes, and their home is decorated, in a style fitting of that particular decade. There is a technical support team on hand to help and advise the family as they tackle the changes in each episode. The three experts are Brits Tom Wrigglesworth and Dr Ben Highmore plus American ex-pat Gia Milinovich who I happen to find very sexy in a geeky kind of way. The narrator is none other than Robert Llewellyn, most famous for playing Kryten in Red Dwarf, and his familiar voice has a comforting effect.
In the first episode the family find themselves back in the 1970s. This was a decade dominated by horrible wallpaper and equally garish furniture. Adam and Georgie have memories of growing up in the Seventies but the experience is a whole new world to 13 year old Hamish, Ellie and Steff, both 12, with 2 year old Jude having no opinion at all.
The Sullivan-Barnes family may as well have been aliens from outer space as I have no experience of their upper middle-class lifestyle. The children can’t be blamed for their attitude as they don’t know any better however, and this was especially true in the first episode, I found Adam and Georgie, Accountant and senior NHS executive, to be incredibly patronising. The narrator has a hand in this as he describes the family turning back the clock and in a slightly shocked tone of voice mentions that they will have to make do with one toilet as opposed to their usual two. I am left stunned at this surprising piece of evidence which indicates I must constantly be living in the Seventies having never experienced the luxury of two toilets in a home. Llewellyn then informs us that the family have a sitting room in place of two receptions. Here was me thinking a reception is that place you visit at the Hospital when you pop in to have your lung checked after a hard life of working as a chimney sweep.
Adam gets to grip with the iconic, though barely road-worthy, Ford Cortina while Hamish experiences the must-have bicycle of the era, the Chopper, and finds himself in trouble with his concerned mother. Georgie goes back to basics in the kitchen as she finds herself without the convenience of a dishwasher and microwave oven. In a decade barren of technological entertainment Adam reacquaints himself with the record player while Hamish, missing his modern videogame systems, is forced to make do with the Binatone and Pong. With a lack of entertainment in their bedrooms the family spend more time together as they watch TV and witness the transition from black and white to colour. In a highlight of the episode Gia meets her lifelong idol Sir Clive Sinclair as he talks about his hugely successful pocket calculators.
As a child of the Eighties I missed out on much of the technology in this episode though I do have fond memories of the Binatone. This is a solid first episode which I enjoyed and the clash between the family’s pampered lifestyle and the relative poverty of the Seventies makes for an interesting spectacle.
You can watch ‘Episode 1: The Seventies’ tonight at 9pm (Tuesday 29th September) on BBC4. Those who miss the episode can catch it on BBC iPlayer.
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I was born at the end of the 1970s and so my childhood was spent in the 1980s and early 1990s. I watched the 1970s and 1980s episodes and, although I enjoyed all the nostalgia, I didn’t feel that the week they spent living the 1980s was a real reflection of ordinary family life at that time. They were living the life of a very privileged 1980s family to be able to afford all that modern technology. I understand that the programme was trying to show how home technology has advanced during the last three decades, but my children also watched some of the programme and I had to explain that computers, games consoles, cd players etc. were all luxuries during that time as they were so expensive. Growing up, we didn’t have a computer, game consoles, microwave, or cd player until the 1990s. I remember friends who did have some of those things but they were few and far between, I had board games, books, dolls, and a second hand bike and my parents cooked the dinner in a conventional oven and played their music on vinyl or cassette. The one thing we did have that was featured, and it was a luxury, was the VHS video recorder. My parents used that same VCR for about 10 years before it finally gave up.