Back in Time For Tea
February BBC Two
The precise title of the latest offering in the Back in Time… living history strand is important. Where previous shows, notably Back in Time for Dinner, have most often looked broadly at middle-class diets and been filmed in London, the new series heads north to tell a regional story of how the diet of working people has changed since 1918. Just a century ago, as the Ellis family from Bradford learn at first hand, many would have struggled to put food on the table at all.
“There definitely was a distinct reliance on calorie-heavy, inexpensive food like bread and potatoes,” explains food historian and British Library curator Polly Russell, who co-presents the series with Radio 2 DJ Sara Cox. “Meat, by contrast, although very much valued and seen as being related to status, was often out of reach of many people. Bulking up the body with a lot of carbohydrates was how the working body was sustained.”
One visible result of this was that workingclass children were shorter than their brethren brought up in wealthier households, leading to children in state primary schools being given milk in the 1930s. “These dietary inequalities play out through the decades,” says Russell, so that, while rationing during the Second World War would have seemed dreary to the wealthy, for the poor it provided “a consistent, nutritious diet almost for the first time”.
But this isn’t just a story of scarcity. In the latter part of the 20th century, food, which would once have taken up as much as a third of the family budget, became much cheaper. In addition new kinds of dishes became available, many brought by immigrants from Asia. “That changed local areas and also local tastes,” says Russell, as demonstrated by scenes filmed on Manchester’s ‘Curry Mile’, which look at how Indian restaurants have evolved.
As for a favourite moment from filming, Russell picks a conversation with a contributor who began work as a dinner lady in the 1970s, and which has huge resonance in an era when we’re again worried about the diet of the nation’s children. “She’d kept all of her original manuals – amazing documentation – but what it really shows was how being a dinner lady was an incredibly skilled and highly valued job,” says Russell. “This wasn’t seen as lastresort, low-paid work. This was feeding the nation’s children, and was seen as something important. I think she said she spent six months just doing potatoes.”