Post-war Christmases could be fun for women – if they could escape the kitchen
Christmas has been going since about September, and as it dances to its stomachbursting, festivejumper-wearing, purse-emptying climax, it’s tempting to yearn for simpler times. But be careful what you wish for, as the Robshaw family found out in Back in Time for Christmas, an inevitable but enjoyable festive version of BBC2’s Back in Time for Dinner. Instead of just experiencing the evening meal of decades gone by, the likeable family had their own seasonal Groundhog Day, celebrating 25 December and all its trappings from the austere Forties through to the Sixties.
Like last time there was impressive attention to detail. They got a retro home for each decade, pitch-perfect dress and historically accurate gifts. That meant there were homemade presents – carrot fudge, yummy – asbestos-laced decorations and ration-era ox heart for dinner in the post-war years. Then they feasted on spam, anchovy and olive canapés (surely due an ironic comeback?) in the Fifties. To welcome the Sixties, they decorated a tinsel tree made in a loo-brush factory and got boxes of fags as presents.
Presenters Giles Coren and Dr Polly Russell were pretty much redundant in this. They sent Coren to the football with dad Duncan, a lecturer, and son, Fred, just to give him something to do. And it was what men did on Christmas Day up until the Fifties, we learned. Women had a raw deal and it was conveyed well by the screen-friendly Robshaws who are the right proportions of thoughtful, funny and game for giving anything a go. “Just what I need to imprison myself,” said Rochelle as she unwrapped some aprons in the Fifties.
The family agreed pared-down Christmases could be more meaningful, if the girls were ever allowed out the kitchen. But for 11-year-old Fred, the next instalment of Seventies to Nineties consumerism looked brighter. “If you’re like me and you’re in it for the presents, then it’s great.”
It’s safe to say that I never really got physics at school. I relied on cleverer mates to copy from in class and just crammed for exams, forgetting everything the minute I put my pen down. So actually, I was the ideal viewer for Inside Einstein’s Mind: the Enigma of Space and Time as it attempted to explain, in simple terms, the German genius’s theory of general relativity. The
Historical accuracy meant asbestos-laced decorations and ration-era ox heart for dinner
peg was the centenary of his big idea, but, come off it, this is the sort of stuff BBC4 loves any day of the week – and does well.
There were some cute model train sets to explain his visual thought experiments, that even I could get my tiny brain around thanks to narration from David Tennant who took the tone of a dad explaining something complicated to his confused charge (the former Time Lord is a father of four, after all). There were some clever talking heads to deliver more of Einstein’s biography that zipped it all along. I found the little insights into his character the most interesting.
We were told that Einstein once said that in his teens when he was developing his theories, thinking about light beams made his palms sweat. “You and I may remember what was causing our palms to sweat at aged 16, and it was not a light beam, but that’s why he’s Einstein,” said one of the physics bods. Quite.