BACK IN TIME FOR BIRMINGHAM
BBC Two, 8pm
There have been seven previous series of Back in Time… covering a huge array of everyday features of British life over the past 100 years, from food and fashion to work and leisure pursuits. This is the second series to focus specifically on the lives and experiences of British immigrants. In 2016, Back in Time for Brixton looked at how a Caribbean family from the Windrushgeneration negotiated life in London in the post-war years. This series shifts its focus to Birmingham, to explore forging a new life in Britain through the eyes of the Sharma family who, over the next four nights, abandon their modern home in Solihull to travel back in time through six decades of British Asian history and discover the various ways in which previous generations of South Asians put down roots, found prosperity and helped shape modern Birmingham along the way.
Tonight’s edition drops the Sharmas in at the deep end, in 1950s-era inner-city Sharkbrook, an area where many new arrivals would have found themselves. There, for only around £1 a week they could rent a sparsely furnished room with access to a shared kitchen. And in a Britain where strict rationing was still in place, ingenuity was needed to recreate small morsels of home comfort food.