Back in Time for Dinner (2015–…): Season 1, Episode 2 - The 1960s - full transcript
In this second episode, the family and their home are transported to the space-age 60s, with a gleaming fitted kitchen and the arrival of a host of new tastes and flavors. Hairy biker Dave Myers delivers the family their long-awaited fridge, along with his memories of the trans-formative effect of the appliance on his own childhood. There's a family trip to the new-fangled self-service supermarket, and Giles discovers how chicken went from an expensive treat to an everyday staple.
Meet the Robshaws - Brandon, Rochelle, Miranda, Ros and Fred.
Let's go!
For one summer, this food-loving family is embarking
on an extraordinary time-travelling adventure to discover how
a post-war revolution in what we eat,
has transformed the way we live.
That is just amazing. Look at them!
Britain has gone from meagre rations to
ready-meals at the touch of a button in just 50 years.
Blip, blip, blip, blip, blip.
But how has this changed our health, our homes...
We've got a pull-out larder!
..and our family dynamics?
Can't do it any more.
This is what would make a woman break.
To find out, the Robshaws are going to shop,
cook and eat their way through history.
It's 1974! Whoa!
I think that is enough sugar now though, darling.
No, I only put hardly any on!
Starting in 1950, their own home will be their time machine...
Oh, my goodness!
This carpet hurts my eyes. Who designed that?
Someone who was colour-blind.
Fast-forwarding them through a new year each day,
as they experience, first hand, the culinary fads, fashions
and gadgets of each age.
Last time, the family lived through the austerity of the '50s.
No!
No, in the '50s, they had to just eat what was there. Try it.
This week, they enter the 1960s space age...
Oh, my goodness!
Look, look, look at them! Have you seen 'em?
..as they discover how our changing relationship with
food has shaped all of our lives.
Dog food.
No, it's a poo ring!
The food was pretty strange. It was still pretty British.
It's '62, come on, can we not get some flavour?
It's the second phase of our time-travel adventure
and the Robshaws' functional '50s house has been transformed
into a comfortable 1960s home,
full of mod-cons that speak to Britain's booming economy.
The kitchen has even expanded to reflect the average family
home of the era.
Food historian, Polly Russell, and I, are back to see what the
'60s holds in store for the Robshaws.
No, we've come to the wrong house.
This is it and isn't it an improvement?
This is not a place that you'd mind spending time in.
No, as long as you didn't have a problem with baby blue.
It's just not such a cell, with just a sort of different use of space.
Yeah, that's right.
It's all been organised to be much more ergonomic.
Just look at the number of journey's she's making.
Scientists actually mapped how far women walked
when they were preparing food.
Look out! The milk's boiling!
There, not bad, was it?
Not bad? It was dreadful.
I counted 20 journeys.
And the kitchen is fitted, isn't it?
It is fitted and the design of this kitchen is supposed to be
helping the woman and making her life much more easy.
New plastic surfaces and utensils make keeping kitchens clean
much easier and there are advances in other areas too.
There's a significant increase in the amount of food that's
- available...
- Oh, is there?
- So have a look in the cupboard.
- Quite a lot more processed branded food.
- Uh-huh.
So, lots of, sort of, tinned beef and pasta and beans and an awful
lot of meals which can just be opened from a can and served.
Yeah, you're right.
This is the era of technology coming into the kitchen to save labour.
You've got an electric kettle and an electric toaster, even a
great ham-fisted clutzy old bloke can make toast in a thing like that.
Yeah, I'm not sure how much he would make toast, cos, obviously,
it's better if you can get someone else to do it for you.
And what's Rochelle going to do with all this free time?
Well, although she's got the gadgets,
although she's got the convenience food, she's still spending
seven to nine hours a day cleaning and cooking and making sure
the kitchen keeps looking as perfect and pristine as it does now.
After her 1950s experience, kitchen drudgery will come as no surprise to
Rochelle, who worked 11 hours a day to feed and look after her family.
15-year-old Ros and big sister, Miranda, were expected to
follow in their mum's footsteps.
And university lecturer, Brandon became a classic '50s dad,
waited on at every meal.
Now it's time for the Robshaws to step into the '60s.
I want to see what happens next,
I want to see how the role might expand.
I'm really looking forward to having more interesting foods,
having a little bit more freedom.
I'm looking forward to the '60s.
I'm hoping that I'll have a chance to be in the kitchen.
For six weeks, the Robshaws are swapping their modern
diet for the food of the past.
This time they're eating strictly '60s style,
with every day bringing a new year and a new experience.
Whoa!
It looks like I'm dead and stuffed!
We've got a TV. Wow! Oh, gosh, that's just like the one I had.
Ah, we've got some singles, as well.
Oh, The Beatles.
Singles were small.
It does feel lounge-y, doesn't it?
- That's cos it's a...
- Lounge!
Oh, my goodness! Oh, my goodness!
This is just brilliant!
It's so much brighter than the '50s, isn't it?
And it's fitted, it's fitted.
All these surfaces are very shiny, aren't they? Shiny and new.
In fact, it's hurting my eyes a bit.
Oh, isn't that clever, a hand-held blender than we've got here.
- Wow!
- Ooh!
There's considerably more in there than in the '50s.
That is the food cupboard of a more affluent society.
What I'm looking for and what I can't see, is the fridge.
So I'm still quite surprised that it's 1960
and there isn't a fridge, not even a tiny, tiny fridge.
Wey-hey. Welcome to the '60s.
And you all look amazing. I've never seen so much polyester in one place.
It is, sort of, fairly scary
if you get too close to this new toaster, you might melt.
What do you think's going be best about the '60s?
More sweets.
More sweets, that's true. And there'll be more sugar.
That's a fairly key thing, you can probably get chocolate bars
and various kinds of sweets.
And as you know, I've got your manual here and it's going to be
all about the national food survey and what people were really eating.
Each year, from 1940 to 2000, thousands of families
recorded every meal they ate over the course of a week
for the national food survey, providing an extraordinary
window into Britain's changing eating habits.
The survey will guide the Robshaws through their 1960s diet.
So what sort of meals are you expecting?
Well I'd kind of hoped as the '60s goes on, we might get some
more adventurous kind of foods, you know, like foreign foods.
And what about you?
More flavour, cos really the only flavour in the
'50s was like salt and pepper. That's not really a flavour.
It's not that exciting yet.
It's gammon and Brussels sprouts and stewing steak and potatoes
and sort of, you know, fairly straightforward ingredients.
Quite a lot of cooking.
It's about making your kitchen the lair of a domestic goddess.
Do you think you're up to that?
Well, I'll give it my best shot.
Like 70% of married women in 1960, Rochelle will be a full-time
housewife, while Brandon's kitchen duties are limited to tea making.
It's really nice you're making me a cup of tea, Brandon.
Well, that's all right, darling.
I've waited ten years.
Well, everything comes to her who waits.
It's time to cook dinner and Rochelle and Miranda
are lifting the menu straight out of the national food survey.
OK, this is a family.
Mum, 32, dad, 41, daughter, 13,
daughter, 11, son, nine, and a daughter of seven.
In Bradford north in 1960.
Tea, corned beef hash, rice pudding, tea, milk and sugar.
Why doesn't it open? Why doesn't it...?
I'm not giving up.
This is the modern world now, isn't it? Oh!
Right, this time, I have this.
No tin is safe now.
Don't need this stupid key.
Right, we're just having vegetables.
Tinned meat was cheap and with food prices much higher than
they are today, it was a 1960s family staple.
The national food survey shows that families spent 28% of their
weekly income on food, compared to as little as 12% today.
- God, it looks actually horrible.
- Yeah.
Rice pudding was a big thing of my childhood.
I do think it's a good way to use up milk before it, sort of, goes off.
But I don't know if mum did it cos we didn't have a fridge,
I don't know.
Maybe that's why a fridge means such a lot to me.
Oh, that looks nice and colourful.
It does, it smells good.
This was made by a woman in Bradford.
I like the vegetables, but I don't like the meat.
- What, you don't like this lovely corned beef?
- No.
You could actually have this in the '50s. Yeah.
It's kind of the same.
There's been so sudden dramatic change.
Same dinner, different dinner time.
In the '50s, most people had taken their main meal at midday, but
in the '60s, more families shifted this meal to the early evening.
That is another important social change, isn't it?
The fact that now, in the '60s we're all sitting eating together.
You're not, kind of, eating, behind my back like you did in the '50s.
I didn't eat behind your back.
I feel impressed with my new kitchen, I think it looks modern.
But I'm still in it.
I'd be more impressed with my kitchen if I wasn't in it.
To be honest, maybe it was good you being in the kitchen for longer,
because you can learn how to open the cans.
The first meal we've had was pretty '50s, which you expect
because it didn't just change overnight,
but I hope that there'll be a much wider range of foods soon.
It's a new day which means a new year for the Robshaws.
So I've got one or two things here to make breakfast
- a bit more exciting.
- Tony, the tiger!
Coco Pops 1961, that appeared.
Do you want to have a butchers at the Coco Pops which comes with
- an exciting toy?
- I just want that toy.
Yeah, go on, you try and find it. The toy's not actually in there.
You only need to collect 15 tokens, which, in your case,
it'll be about 1985 by the time we get to the toy.
The reason that people started eating these things,
was because advertisers cottoned on, at that stage,
that the person to go for was the kids. You know, you lot.
Hush, hush, what can you hear? You can't hear...
By targeting children directly, '60s cereal ads were playing a new
marketing game - pester power.
Rice Krispies, they're saying,
"We're fresh and we're crisp and we're nice Rice Krispies."
In the national food survey, there's strong evidence that people
were eating cereal for supper quite a lot, which is just sort of
what you do with a new food, that you've got to eat it all the time.
- Can we do that?
- No.
- Why not?
- Yeah, dad, why not?
- You're being stern 1950s dad.
Yeah, I'm being a bit austere.
Britain's cereal consumption soared by 47% over the decade,
along with children's sugar intake.
- That's enough, Fred.
- He's having a second bowl.
Are you eating because you're hungry,
as people had done for the whole of human history up to this point,
or are you eating because this stuff is being sold to you hard
- with cartoon characters and lots of sugar?
- Second one.
So it's not just sugary cereal that people got at breakfast.
They got a new kind of bread.
This is squishy, white, sliced bread made by the Chorleywood process.
In 1961, baking scientists at Chorleywood, Hertfordshire,
redesigned the humble loaf.
By adding extra yeast, fat and additives
and kneading the dough in high speed mixers, they slashed traditional
production times and created soft loaves that stayed fresh for days.
An instant hit, today, 80% of British bread,
brown and white, is made using the Chorleywood process.
You can imagine someone, you know, arriving home in 1962,
opening it up, wow, it's already sliced, it's really squishy,
it's really sweet, easy to put in the toaster.
It does look modern.
It's the sort of bread you'd take into space.
Yes. If I was taking a sandwich into space, yeah.
- Which they had to!
- Through the helmet, like that.
- So, do you want to eat some?
- Yeah.
- Go on, tuck in.
The thing about this bread, though, it does make good toast, doesn't it?
How do you feel about the end of your daily walk to the baker's shop?
What am I replacing it with? What am I doing?
Cleaning. Yeah, maybe I'm doing more cleaning.
But there's no housework today.
I've arranged for Brandon and Rochelle to dine out at a restaurant
for the first time since their time-travelling adventure began.
What do you think of the motor, then?
- I think it's lovely, Brandon.
- It's beautiful, yeah.
- Yeah.
Before the 1960s, eating out usually meant a simple meal at a pub
or a fish and chip shop.
High quality restaurants were few.
The 1961 Good Food Guide listed only 70 outside London.
But with a third of households now car owners and families enjoying
more disposable income, Britain's dining out habits were changing.
Hello!
Brandon's sister, Glynis, and her partner, Matt,
are sharing this foray into fine dining 1961 style at,
of all places, Newport Pagnell service station.
And welcome to glamorous dining 1961.
Hello, shall we go through?
Polly will be their hostess with the mostest.
Back in 1961 when motorways were only three-years-old,
service stations were chic destinations,
complete with silver service restaurants.
So were you surprised being dropped off here, Rochelle?
Yeah, I was.
I mean, I could imagine going to, like, a Little Chef,
but I didn't, sort of, like equate that with a fine dining experience.
Well, in 1961, this was somewhere to come in your car on your modern
motorway to, sort of, display that you're part of the modern world.
This is the 1961 Newport Pagnell version of wine,
which disappointingly for you is non-alcoholic,
because service stations were not given licenses by local
authorities even though there were no drink-drive laws at the time.
So this would have been disappointing for people
coming out to dine here when they would have been used to
getting tanked up before having a nice drive.
- Enjoy the wine.
- Thank you. Cheers everybody.
- Cheers.
- Cheers, guys.
- Cheers, thanks, Brandon.
That's your meal, probably the best meal you've ever
had in a service station, I should think. Enjoy your meal.
- Lovely, thank you.
- Thank you.
The last time I got taken to a service station,
I got an Eccles cake.
- So this is better?
- This is better.
- Vastly superior.
It does feel quite a, sort of, grand experience.
I'm really enjoying it.
Well, it was a rare treat I would have thought.
But it's meat with two veg. People are going out to, sort of,
eat familiar food that they could have had at home.
It's acceptable to the British palate, isn't it?
It's not challenging.
- But it was very nice, wasn't it?
- It's lovely.
Fine dining continued to increase in popularity throughout the '60s
and by 1969, the number of fancy restaurants listed in the
Good Food Guide had nearly quadrupled.
What do you think?
- Well, is this the sort of thing you'd now expect at home?
- Well, yeah.
In an ideal world, yeah this is where I'm setting the bar.
Just got back from the service station for a meal
and it struck me that it must be like people going up
the shard these days and having a fantastic experience there.
It must have felt so modern.
It's a new year and I'm sending the Robshaws the kitchen
appliance of their dreams, courtesy of a chef who remembers
the day in 1962, when this gadget changed his family's life.
- Hello.
- Oh, wow!
- You must be Brandon!
- Yes, I am.
- You look great!
- Thanks very much.
- I'm Dave.
- Are you Dave the hairy biker?
- Yeah!
- Welcome, come in.
Yeah, can't wait to see your kitchen.
- Hello! Rochelle?
- Yes, it is.
- Dave.
- Hi, Dave.
- Pleased to meet you.
- Hi.
- This must be Miranda? Hello, Dave, pleased to meet you.
- Gosh, this is a complete time capsule, isn't it?
- Yeah.
It certainly is, yes.
- Oh, show us your pantry.
- Oh, excuse me!
Funnily enough, it doesn't bring back too many memories
because I grew up in a two-up, two-down,
so my kitchen in 1962 was a bit primitive compared to this one.
I was five-years-old and there was an event that happened
that changed all our lives and I think, you know,
we can do a bit more updating in this kitchen.
Do you want to go and get Rosalind and Fred?
Yeah, will do, OK. Fred! Ros!
Look, Fred, look who's here.
Well, have I got a surprise for you lot.
Go on, cover your eyes up!
- Ta-da!
- Oh!
- Oh, wow.
- Isn't it lovely?
- Oh, my goodness me.
- That's nice.
- That's so cool.
- Cheese.
- Oh, look at that.
It's really going to revolutionise my life.
Well, you're part of the lucky few, because in 1962 there was only
one household in three had a refrigerator.
I'll tell you what though, this looks over to you, Brandon,
- being the man of the house.
- I think this is a job for the man, isn't it?
Rochelle, do you want to come with me and we'll discuss
- the art of cold cookery.
- Oh, yes, please.
And we'll leave Brandon to wrestle with this.
- Get your bike revved up.
- See you later.
All right, have fun.
So, now we've got to work out how to get that in there.
Will it, actually...
It won't actually... Will it fit?
It's fine there.
Rochelle's fridge comes with its very own cookbook,
a guide to making the most of this exciting new appliance.
What do you fancy choosing?
Well, I quite like the idea of the garland of peas,
cos I like the idea of a garland of peas, and the lamb in mint jelly.
There's green food colouring in that,
so it's going to look a pretty psychedelic table.
Right, so it's all going to be a green menu.
- Look at that.
- It's a bit of a clash.
It's like Kew Gardens, innit?
Right, we need... So shall we do everything as per the recipes
- and just see what...?
- Yes.
I'll get the lamb and chop it up.
That's it. Shall I drain it?
Oh, yes, please. Oh, they're funny looking peas, aren't they?
Tinned peas. They'll go in then.
Peas go in ring.
How many would this have fed? Oh, oh!
Let's just all pour the peas down the hole. Hold on.
Both of tonight's dishes involve gelatine,
a setting agent that's quite hard to use without a fridge.
Put it under the freezer where it's colder,
my mother used to always say.
Oh, it is cold, yeah.
Rochelle, you're going to love this device.
Now it's the '60s,
now all you've got to do is sit around for three hours while it sets.
- How do you feel?
- Well, I think to myself, what will I do?
What will I do in that time?
Perhaps I'll read a magazine or perhaps I'll crochet myself
a jumper or something.
So, maybe, the fridge is what brought women's liberation?
You get a fridge and then you burn your bra!
That's it. In the fridge, it would take a long time...
Well, the pop man used to come once a week
and now you've got a fridge, your pop will never be warm.
How cool's that?
- Cheers, guys.
- Cheers.
Ew!
Maybe it'll taste nicer than it looks.
We used to make lollies out of this in the new fridge.
- Whoa!
- Urgh!
- What is that, Rochelle?
- Dog food?
- No.
- What is appearing?!
- Smells like dog food. - It's a pea ring.
Actually smells like dog food.
And what's that?
This is from the cookbook.
It's show-off food, it's food with a bit of pizzazz.
- Oh, my God, that's weird. - Look at that.
- That's fantastic.
- So you could never eat this
- before you had a refrigerator.
- That's true.
- We'll be able to eat this all the time now.
- Yeah.
- It's tasty.
- I'm not a fan of the jelly, though.
Like, at all.
I would certainly eat it again,
but it's probably quite a lot of effort to prepare, isn't it?
Surprisingly not. It's absolutely no effort whatsoever.
Even though the food was pretty strange,
it was still pretty British.
Mint, maybe some lemon, you know, it wasn't
very exotic and I think my palate does want a change.
It's '62, come on, can we not get some flavour?!
# When the moon hits your eye
# Like a big pizza pie that's amore... #
Ros, what does it say for 1963 national food surveys?
Oh, that's so cool. Spaghetti bolognese.
Ooh, fantastic.
I guess it's our first foreign dish, isn't it?
It doesn't feel foreign, though.
Now it just feels kind of normal, but then it would have been exotic.
An upsurge in package holidays to the Mediterranean, kick-started
Britain's appetite for foreign cuisine.
By 1963, over 3.5 million people were heading
south annually for sun, fun and a whiff of exotic food.
# When the stars make you drool
# Just like a pasta e fasuli that's amore... #
Back home, Elizabeth David's classic book on Mediterranean food
inspired adventurous cooks to recreate these flavours.
1950, that was first published.
In the '50s, it would have been out of my league to, sort of, make
this kind of food.
I don't think I would have had access to the ingredients.
By 1964, all David's books were available in paperback
and the ingredients were becoming more accessible too,
although keen housewives still had to be resourceful.
Olive oil was commonly used to treat earache
and most easily found at a chemists.
And buying Parmesan cheese
and garlic meant a trip to an Italian deli.
It's interesting to be making something that's not British
and the fact that, you know, I'd have to go into, like, Soho or
the west end to actually get hold of the ingredients, would be
a really, really big, you know, thing to be doing.
Today, it's Miranda who's venturing into Soho.
In 1963, the majority of teenage girls left school at 15
and in a golden age of nearly full employment,
most walked straight into full-time jobs.
17-year-old Miranda is about to start a shift at one
of Britain's new, hip '60s hang-outs, an Italian coffee bar.
Black Americano.
There are two different generations going on at the moment.
There's my mum who's still in the kitchen,
then there's her daughter, me, and I have much more freedom.
'60s teenagers had money too.
A massive 70% of their wages was disposable income,
more than at any time before or since, which they spent
freely on music, fashion and going out, creating a new youth culture.
This is yours, this is mine, shall we?
- Urgh!
- Mmm, what do you think of that?
- The first time drinking espresso?
- It's really horrible.
- Really? Oh, my God!
- OMG!
You've had coffee before?
Yeah, I've had coffee but it's really strong.
- Well, that's why it's espresso.
- OMG!
OK, cafe latte, small takeaway.
Even to me, having been born in the '90s,
that cup of coffee was like nothing I've ever tasted.
I was like, whoa!
That's probably what latched people onto it,
cos it's such a different flavour.
Back home, Rochelle's also stirring up a pot full of foreign flavour.
She's following in the footsteps of one of the national food
survey's more adventurous cooks,
a 48-year-old mother of two from the posh London suburb of Twickenham.
Supper - spaghetti bolognese, home-made cake, tea, milk and sugar.
There is now the sort of range of flavours that I'm using which
I haven't been using, sort of, before.
Like particularly the garlic and the basil and the olive oil
and the spaghetti, of course, and the Parmesan.
Actually, half of it.
Ooh! Bolognese!
- Oh, wow.
- Got to say that looks...
It's spaghetti! Is it spaghetti bolognese?
- Yes,
- it is. I'm just so excited.
- Are you?
- I really am.
But wait a minute, Fred, wait till we've...
We've got to wait. But, honestly, my mouth is watering.
- Can we start?
- Can we start?
I hope it's nice.
It's lovely.
Do you think it's lovely, because it's the first meal
we've had that tastes different?
Yeah. Olive oil, garlic, Parmesan cheese.
- And spaghetti.
- Lovely rich flavours, aren't they?
- Yeah.
- And they're flavours we haven't had.
- Yeah.
- For the last 12 years.
- Yes.
I can see why this became a typical British family favourite.
That's how good it is, people are actually scraping the dish.
I can imagine just eating boring food and then to suddenly have that,
must have been amazing, it must have been a taste revolution.
And I think from here on in, is the start of more interesting foods.
I feel like the '60s have really begun and it does feel like a big
shift from the early '60s and the '50s now.
Another day, another year.
Time for the revolution in what we ate
and where it came from, to really get going.
Until 1964, food suppliers controlled the price of their goods,
so wherever you shopped, the cost of food was broadly the same.
But the Resale Prices Act passed in this year, abolished
the suppliers' control and price wars began.
This gave real advantage to big buyers, ie supermarkets.
They were able to drive down prices.
It meant that small buyers,
individual retailers could not compete.
Prior to 1964, supermarkets were thin on the ground
and Rochelle has used only small local shops.
Until now.
- Hi.
- Great to see you.
- Yeah, you too.
Welcome to shopping 1960s style, a completely new experience.
- I've got a shopping list.
- Yes, at the minute, it's small,
but it might grow as I walk round the aisles.
Yeah, you'll be tempted by all the new products. OK?
Better take a wire basket.
There's just so much to look at, isn't there?
Isn't there just so much to look at.
It's absolutely extraordinary.
Given Rochelle's experience in the '50s, I think
she's going to enjoy being able to make her own choices,
having the freedom to take what she wants.
Does this feel really different?
Well, yeah, because when I went to the local shops
and asked for whatever you wanted and they'd bring it to you,
but this way, I am actually choosing what I want myself.
There's so much choice. Yay!
No, you're being silly now.
- That's silly.
- I'm going to stock up.
I'm guessing we're going to be able to keep about 1% of this.
And already I'm feeling tempted by other items that
I might not have bought.
So that means things like this.
I think, oh, maybe I'll buy that as well since I'm here.
Does this bring back any memories of going shopping when you were a kid?
- Well, I remember going to the first big supermarket with my mum.
- Do you?
- Yeah, I do.
- It must have looked really dazzling
- the fact that you weren't used to it.
- Yeah.
If you've just been going to a corner shop where you know
the person inside the shop and they're saying, you know,
"This is what I've got for you today, Mrs Robshaw,"
or, you know, "This is your usual."
And then suddenly there's nobody to give you your usual.
Usual is it? In the back room?
Tesco and Sainsbury's were at the forefront of Britain's 1960s
self-service boom, when numbers of supermarket stores shot up from
fewer than 600 to nearly 3,500 by the end of the decade.
At the same time, a fifth of independent grocers closed,
unable to compete with the choice
and prices on offer in the supermarket aisles.
- Hey, look what I've found. Frozen chicken.
- Wow.
Look at that, that's the first time we've had it in this experience.
It is.
Supermarkets didn't just supply the demand, sometimes they created it
by making once unattainable foods, affordable for all.
Not many years ago the chicken was an expensive
luxury for special occasions only.
But today, it's an easily available
and comparatively cheap food ready to be popped into the oven.
Chicken became an everyday item in the '60s after Sainsbury's
engaged a handful of poultry suppliers to transform
small-scale British chicken farming into a massive industry.
I'm meeting John Maunder, one of the original suppliers
challenged by Sainsbury's to up production.
The introduction to volume production of chicken was
an American idea brought over to this country by Sainsbury directors.
They saw the opportunity of a pre-packaged product
such as a whole chicken, as being something that would
fit in to this new style of supermarket, self-service store.
And they led you to believe that as many chickens as you could
- produce, they could sell?
- Yes.
The concept was, that if we produced it in large enough quantities,
we could reduce the unit price.
If we reduced the unit price, then people would be able to
afford it and if they could afford it, they would buy more of it.
And it was true, of course, because no sooner had
we offered these affordable chicken, the demand grew.
The new cheap chicken cost a third less and sales leapt from
ten million chickens a year to 150 million in the space of a decade.
And our love affair with chicken has continued to grow.
Today, Britons eat around 800 million annually,
accounting for more than half our total meat consumption.
Closer to home, there was another source
of culinary inspiration - television,
as millions tuned into watch Fanny Cradock take the nation's
cooking skills in hand.
Jenny, do you know how to cook chips?
Oh, yes, you just prepare the chips and fry them in boiling fat.
- It's entertaining, isn't it?
- Yes, it's like '60s Nigella.
- Yeah.
You must have an increased amount of leisure in order to, sort of,
sit and watch this.
Later in the series, her husband, Johnnie, used to appear
and he used to be like her, sort of, kitchen helper,
but she just kind of like bossed him about.
Where are my egg whites?
- Tried looking?
- Well, since you're here,
will you pour them into the bowl for me, please?
Right.
Now vanish.
And so on with the lot.
Bossy, but much-loved, Fanny was Britain's first TV celebrity chef.
TV chefs are able to, sort of, get in this gap in the market
because everyone's got a little bit more food and more
labour-saving gadgets and they're like, "Oh what can I do with it?"
And now there's this gap and TV chefs can come in and be like,
"Yes, I can show you how."
Since the start of this experiment in 1950,
the Robshaws have been locked into the stereotypical roles of the past.
Dad brings home the bacon...
..and mum cooks it.
But a big screen icon was sowing the seeds of change.
In 1965, Michael Caine played spy
and gourmet Harry Palmer in the hit film, The Ipcress File.
In Palmer's hands, food was the ultimate tool of seduction,
which helped entice men into the kitchen.
I'm here to initiate Brandon into the joys of the culinary arts.
This is a moment where we're going to have a slight
revolution and things.
So, this is going to be your first crack at cooking something.
Brilliant. I feel absolutely delighted.
I'm really looking forward to cooking.
You're going to make a two-course meal for Rochelle,
who's going to disappear and do something feminine.
Oh! Oh, good luck in the kitchen...
- Thanks very much.
- ..with your gadget.
- Thank you.
Excellent.
In their modern lives, Brandon regularly cooks family meals,
but tonight's menu is very much dinner a deux.
Blended vegetable soup. Chicken in a creamy sauce. Fresh asparagus.
Potatoes, white wine.
OK, so have a chop of that.
There's no directions on, you know, how to chop it up, so...
You're not going to even peel the onion?
What do you suppose your father would have been
doing in the kitchen in 1965?
Oh, my dad couldn't do anything in the kitchen.
I think he made coffee sometimes.
He couldn't cook, he wasn't happy at all cooking,
so he never got into that.
He didn't know modern scientific things like peeling an onion?
- No, this isn't working as well as it...
- No, no, it's fine.
So, listen, all these clearly defined roles that we've got in
the '60s, has it been affecting your marriage in any way?
No. No, I don't think it has.
The only thing, I think, that it has affected, you know,
Rochelle has been saying that she does actually need to spend
less time in the kitchen now.
So she's becoming dissatisfied as a result of things improving?
In a sense, I think she is.
I think she's just thinking, well, I've got all this time
on my hands, I could do something, you know, more interesting.
Rochelle, what would you like me to do to your hair today?
Well, I think I probably would like to go high.
Yeah, I just... As high as you can get it.
- Right. Like Dusty high?
- Dusty, high, yeah, yeah.
- OK.
In the '50s, women's magazines had focused on dispensing
housekeeping advice.
Now beauty tips were just as important.
Between 1959 and 1966, the value of Britain's beauty market
soared by 165% and many women used the housekeeping time
they were saving, to make regular trips to the hairdresser.
Roles and stuff are changing,
like in the '50s you wouldn't have just been sitting in a salon
having your hair done and you're doing that now.
She's getting her hair done, she's not working.
- No, she's getting her hair done.
- Yeah.
It's just having leisure time.
Yeah, leisure time to make herself look good for Dad.
Not to, sort of, go out and be her own woman.
Do you think, I mean, probably then, as now, that cooking's
different for men than it is for women?
Yes, I suppose so.
I think that when men cook, they're showing off and I think
when women cook, then they're not doing it to be impressive
they're just doing it to put a meal on the table.
- That will certainly have been true of then...
- Yeah.
The idea that the men...
I think, you know, that the man would cook some delicious,
sort of, chicken in a velvety sauce with a glass of wine
- and he's expecting something in return.
- That's right.
- I think we know what it is.
- I think we know what it is!
These styles were sometimes known as marriage-wreckers
because once you're in bed, you don't want to mess your hair up.
I wonder what Brandon will think of that
after he's cooked a nice dinner.
He won't cook again, will he?
I'll have another ten years in the kitchen
because I changed my hairstyle.
- OK, you ready to see it? It looks amazing.
- I'm ready.
- Look.
- Oh, my goodness me! That's absolutely fantastic!
Wow, no, I can understand why they're called marriage wreckers.
No-one's getting their hands on this.
Don't want to mess that up, yeah.
# The look of love... #
- So here's to your success in the kitchen.
- Cheers.
- Here's to your success in the hairdressers.
- Yeah.
Where'd you go, anyway?
Oh, I went to a little place round the corner.
How did you find the kitchen?
I actually found it hard work.
That cooker's not that easy to use, there's only two rings really
you can use and they just get super-hot.
I am actually really impressed with how you've dealt with all that,
just got on and cooked some great meals.
I think that's really what women do though, isn't it?
- That's what women do.
- They don't start complaining about the cooker.
You're right, whereas I've just spent ten minutes going on
and on about what I...
- I'm going to go and get the soup now.
- Right, OK.
Oh, I haven't taken this off yet.
POTS CRASH
Brandon! You all right?
Very, very nice to have a meal cooked for me for, sort of,
after what feels like it's been like a really, really long time.
- Do you want me to serve you?
- Yeah, please, yeah.
I've been feeling still quite pulled down by the kitchen
and getting my hair done and then coming back and somebody
actually doing something for you, did have this enormous lifting effect.
- Look at that.
- It's ages since I've had an After Eight.
So sophisticated, isn't it? Who knows what will happen after eight?
A new day and a new year.
It's 1966 and like 32 million people across the UK, the Robshaws
are getting ready to watch England play Germany in the World Cup final.
That looks good.
To help them celebrate the occasion, I've sent another
'60s food forged in the white heat of technology.
Ew, it's meat!
- Oh, my goodness, yes.
- Oh, my goodness!
These are Vesta meals.
These are dried meals that you can make in 20 minutes.
There's loads of 'em!
It's a totally new kind of food, isn't it?
This is the chef...
and cook the paella and it took him four hours.
Vesta meals used a technology first developed for army rations.
Food was freeze-dried into tiny pieces that only needed water
and heat to reconstitute.
This is the wife who cooked and served that wonderful Vesta
paella and she did it all in 20 minutes.
An instant meal and an instant hit.
In 1966, Sainsbury's alone sold nearly half a million boxes.
Look at that, that's our meal.
It's not cooking, it's opening and stirring.
Yeah.
Right. It's modern, it's clean, it's like...
It just seems fast, like a really fast transition.
- What's that?
- Oh.
And the type of food we were cooking and now suddenly we're doing this.
- It happened quite fast.
- That's Bobby Moore there.
There's two Bobbys?
Rochelle and Miranda are preparing beef curry and chicken chow mein
for six, as Fred's cousin, Joe, has joined them for the match.
For many British people, Vesta meals provided their first
taste of non-European food.
And look, that's how I remember it. Look at that!
Look at them!
- Look, look! Look at them, have you seen 'em?
- Yeah.
Look at it, seriously! That has just made my day.
Supposed to be convenience food, it's not very convenient for me.
It'd be more convenient for me to make a sandwich.
No, but the thing is, it's probably quicker than any food
they had then, even though it takes, like, half an hour.
I must say this is the longest 20 minutes I've ever sat through.
There's Bobby Moore, look.
How could we mess up a Vesta meal?
Look, that needs to be in a different pan, doesn't it?
I didn't realise it could be so complicated.
Well, the match will be over by the time this is served.
Looks quite nice though, doesn't it? Want to try a bit?
- Why not?
- I just don't.
- Why not?
- I just don't!
- Go on.
- No!
I bet you it's quite nice.
- Is it?
- No.
- Oh.
- Oh. Oh, wow.
- Thank you.
- It doesn't look as...
- Don't worry about that, just get it in here.
- What's...
- What have I got? Get off!
- Leave off!
We need to get Heidi out.
But it's not as nice as takeaway.
We didn't really have takeaways back in the '60s,
except for fish and chips.
Oh, look! What's that dog doin' in here?
< Miranda let the dog in.
What do you think of this meal?
I think the chow mein works better.
This beef curry is actually a little bit dry and powdery.
Are you disappointed?
I am disappointed, actually. Was it fun to cook?
Well, it took up a lot of pans, actually.
It doesn't look like an instant meal.
- It certainly wasn't instant in time.
- Exactly.
Missed half the match.
What? They've scored?
Did that ball cross the line? They've given the goal.
From my angle, I could see that that didn't go in.
< Mum can see round the TV!
I'm sitting on the side and I can see that, that didn't go in.
It makes a change to be eating in front of the telly, though.
Don't you think it's a bit casual?
Just cos we've got used to sitting and eating round the table.
Now people aren't even listening to me when I talk.
What is more important, the World Cup,
a Vesta meal or what I'm about to say?
I just don't see how watching the World Cup final and eating,
how can that not be good?
Yeah, some people are on the pitch, they think it's all over!
It is now.
And he just scored at exactly the right moment.
Oh, my God. That's just amazing.
So that means they won fair and square after all.
Yeah, cos they got an extra goal that was legitimate.
Oh, I am pleased.
Honestly! I really feel quite relieved.
Increasingly, people were also enjoying international flavours
when they ate out.
Chinese restaurants designed their menus for the British palate,
offering omelette and chips alongside chop suey.
And they were the '60s runaway hit.
By the end of the decade, there were nearly 4,000 restaurants
nationwide, compared with only 300 just over a decade earlier.
Mmm. Mmm, mmm.
We went to a Chinese restaurant which was really fun.
The food was nice, great colours and different shapes
and completely different from what we'd been having.
The change within 15, 16 years, is enormous.
The sense of the foreign, which was completely
absent from the food of the '50s.
Can you hear that?
- They're doing it.
- A bit.
- They're doing it.
TELEPHONE RINGS
Hello? Yeah, hi.
Bye.
What was the message?
It was a message from Giles. You'll never guess. Want to guess?
- OK, I'm moving out.
- Leave it out!
- I am.
- No, you're not.
- I am!
- You're not!
Where are you going? I feel like crying.
How can you just tell us this over the table?!
What have we done to make you want to go?
We're not good enough for you?
You're just going to pack a bag and like walk out?
You're not pregnant are you?
La, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la!
By the late '60s, the social and sexual rule book was being torn up
and many young people were leading lives unimaginable to their parents.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is London.
Swinging London it's been called,
though some people might find a different adjective.
Magazines encouraged women as young as 16 to leave home
and live independently and landlords happily split large
houses into bedsits to accommodate them.
Ros has come to help Miranda settle into her new bedsit.
- Oh, it's really nice.
- It's so nice.
- Ah, this is so cool.
- It's lovely.
- Oh, is this the cooker?
- Cool!
- Oh, my God, that looks dangerous.
You can make fried eggs. Oh, look at this.
That's good.
Oh, I've just moved in and you've already started destroying it.
I know how to put it back up, don't worry.
Well, you do it then.
- Where are you going to put the milk?
- I have no idea.
Maybe we just put it out the window.
You don't put milk out the window!
- I reckon it's better off out there than in here.
- No, it's not.
You're stupid and I don't care if you get milk poisoning.
So, what do you want to make tonight?
If the shops are shut, we can only use the stuff we've got
and we haven't got very much.
With no more than a single ring to cook on,
life in a '60s bedsit didn't always swing.
I've arranged for Katharine Whitehorn,
author of bestselling '60s bedsit survival guide,
Kitchen In The Corner, to share some tips.
There was no question of having a fridge anywhere near, you
had to keep the milk more or less cool out on the windowsill, which
was all right, unless it got knocked over by a pigeon or something.
I don't know whether you're thinking of doing much
- cooking in your bedsitter?
- Yeah, we are really.
We were going to have some people over for dinner tonight,
but we don't know what to cook.
What kind of food do you like cooking?
Or perhaps I should say, like eating best?
In our bag of things, we've got a lot of vegetables.
- Oh, that's terrific.
- Yeah.
You could make a ratatouille out of that.
You cook everything together in one pot.
Did you find that because there weren't as many takeaways,
that you were forced to do more cooking?
Mostly, if you wanted to eat you had to cook it,
however badly you did it.
And everybody is going to be so amazingly impressed that
you've managed to cook them anything at all, that, if it isn't quite
as marvellous as if they'd taken you to the Ritz, it doesn't matter.
- Two onions.
- Yeah.
Two pimentos.
The girls are following Katharine's recipe for one-pot ratatouille,
a nod to Britain's growing confidence with foreign food
which doesn't create much washing up.
What I'm not really too keen on, is the fact that we're
cooking in my bedroom.
I don't like that idea and in future, I really don't think I'll
cook, sort of, onions and garlic as an evening meal.
Or even at all, because why would you want that in
- where you're about to sleep?
- I know.
It just seems so dangerous to have this little, like, fire thing here.
If you were a teenager in the '60s, it would be something very
desirable, to do the whole bedsit thing.
I feel much more independent than I did in the '50s.
There's a massive difference, it's like two different lives.
For me, I don't think this has been a terrifically good decade.
The world feels that it is changing very, very fast
and not for people of my generation.
I think as a woman in the '60s in middle age,
it does feel like a very defunct position to be in.
- So cool.
- So what's cooking?
- It's ratatouille.
Cool! Awesome.
Yeah, and I'm actually really proud of us
because we cooked it in that, on that, with that.
I'm just curious to know, though, how many people would have actually
- bothered to make a ratatouille in their bedsit.
- It's nice.
- It is nice, actually.
- Is this the bread?
- Yes.
- That's cool packaging. Urgh, it's mouldy!
- Did you know it was mouldy?
- No!
You're a terrible host.
I've had it since 1962, so, to be honest, it kept pretty well.
The family are seeing the swinging '60s out in style with a
party celebrating Britain's growing hunger for all things foreign.
It's in honour of an event celebrating European harmony that
began only 11 years after World War II,
the Eurovision Song Contest.
And in 1969, British hopes are pinned on Lulu
and her Boom Bang A Bang.
- Hello Robshaws, hi.
- Hi, Giles.
Nice to see you, I'm glad the '60s have changed hugely
- the role of the women in the home.
- As you can see, yep.
Your hair is having an exciting time.
My hair is really having a great time, yeah.
I'm keeping the lacquer business in business, yeah.
- So you're coming to the Eurovision party?
- I'll come to the party.
I'll drink whatever fancy foreign cocktails you're making
- and have a sniff, at least, of the canapes.
- Can I get a cocktail?
Yes, you can have lots and lots of alcohol,
cos in 1969, there was a special exemption for ten-year-old boys.
- Wa-hey!
- Can't wait.
Every Eurovision buffet dish comes from a popular cookbook of the day.
Everything in the '60s moved very fast.
It moved fast when we were living it, compared to the '50s
and I think that's just because there's a lot more to do.
- Hello.
- Hi. Hi, Polly.
- How are you?
- All right, thank you.
Getting ready for a party?
Yes and you've arrived just in the nick of time.
- We have got, it's a, like, Europe theme.
- Right.
So for Spain, we have, like, devilled eggs
which is just eggs with mayonnaise in, I think.
So what's the authentic Spanish ingredient that you put in it?
- Paprika.
- Anything else?
- Nothing else.
So have you started to see in the '60s,
more influence of foreign food?
Yeah, went out for a Chinese, a couple of years ago.
And we had spaghetti bolognese, that was really nice.
Even though we'd only been living in the '50s
and '60s for not very long, all the change,
it felt exciting, it was just nice to just have new flavours.
Isn't that a cheerful sound?
- Hello.
- Hello!
- Oh, hello.
- Oh, my!
- So how was the decade for you?
Yeah, I think after the greyness of the '50s,
it just felt like everything had kind of sprung to life.
We're becoming more Europeanised.
I do feel just a general, sort of, broadening of horizons,
which is good.
And what about Fred? I mean, how's he coping?
I think he found the '60s easier than the '50s.
He's always been energetic, perhaps a bit hyper
and he was probably more so in the '60s.
Now I don't know whether that was because the clothes themselves
were sort of more informal and casual or whether it was the food.
There's a lot more sugar in his diet.
The 1960s saw the beginning of Britain's love affair with sugar.
The National Food Survey reveals that our consumption
of biscuits, cakes and pastries soared and we sprinkled
nearly half a kilo of sugar on our food and drinks every week.
And how's it been for you generally, the '60s, Rochelle? Can you tell me?
I've personally found the '60s really hard.
Whereas the '50s was about labour and about working,
here in the '60s, you've got these gadgets, you've got the free time
and you don't quite know what you're going to be doing with the free time.
So, it's felt a very, sort of, uncomfortable decade for me.
# Boom bang-a-bang bang
# Boom bang-a-bang bang I love you... #
OK, look this is the results.
That's us!
I think Lulu's won!
Hooray, get in.
Ah, she's so cute!
So how do you think the '60s have been for the Robshaws?
Well, surprisingly, I think it's been great for the kids
and for Brandon, but really not great at all for Rochelle.
Why not? She's got a beehive, she's got flowery dresses.
What more could a woman ask?
I think she's feeling trapped and depressed and slightly oppressed.
You think it's actually grinding her down really, real Rochelle?
I think it is, actually, and I just think she feels a bit sidelined.
The biggest defining feature of the '60s for me, has been
the generational gap.
Because I really did feel like I was living a different
life to the one my mum was.
However glamorous she looked,
she was still in the kitchen cooking and that was her job.
This is the time for the young.
It's like kicking off everything that went before, it's a
totally different feel...
That anything is possible, except me getting out the kitchen.
Next time, the Robshaws groove into the 1970s.
- Oh.
- Oh.
I'm not really sure what it tastes like.
Where does the flour come out of? Oh!
Got flour that comes out of heads, pickled onions with faces.
It's like the whole kitchen is mocking me.
Let's go!
For one summer, this food-loving family is embarking
on an extraordinary time-travelling adventure to discover how
a post-war revolution in what we eat,
has transformed the way we live.
That is just amazing. Look at them!
Britain has gone from meagre rations to
ready-meals at the touch of a button in just 50 years.
Blip, blip, blip, blip, blip.
But how has this changed our health, our homes...
We've got a pull-out larder!
..and our family dynamics?
Can't do it any more.
This is what would make a woman break.
To find out, the Robshaws are going to shop,
cook and eat their way through history.
It's 1974! Whoa!
I think that is enough sugar now though, darling.
No, I only put hardly any on!
Starting in 1950, their own home will be their time machine...
Oh, my goodness!
This carpet hurts my eyes. Who designed that?
Someone who was colour-blind.
Fast-forwarding them through a new year each day,
as they experience, first hand, the culinary fads, fashions
and gadgets of each age.
Last time, the family lived through the austerity of the '50s.
No!
No, in the '50s, they had to just eat what was there. Try it.
This week, they enter the 1960s space age...
Oh, my goodness!
Look, look, look at them! Have you seen 'em?
..as they discover how our changing relationship with
food has shaped all of our lives.
Dog food.
No, it's a poo ring!
The food was pretty strange. It was still pretty British.
It's '62, come on, can we not get some flavour?
It's the second phase of our time-travel adventure
and the Robshaws' functional '50s house has been transformed
into a comfortable 1960s home,
full of mod-cons that speak to Britain's booming economy.
The kitchen has even expanded to reflect the average family
home of the era.
Food historian, Polly Russell, and I, are back to see what the
'60s holds in store for the Robshaws.
No, we've come to the wrong house.
This is it and isn't it an improvement?
This is not a place that you'd mind spending time in.
No, as long as you didn't have a problem with baby blue.
It's just not such a cell, with just a sort of different use of space.
Yeah, that's right.
It's all been organised to be much more ergonomic.
Just look at the number of journey's she's making.
Scientists actually mapped how far women walked
when they were preparing food.
Look out! The milk's boiling!
There, not bad, was it?
Not bad? It was dreadful.
I counted 20 journeys.
And the kitchen is fitted, isn't it?
It is fitted and the design of this kitchen is supposed to be
helping the woman and making her life much more easy.
New plastic surfaces and utensils make keeping kitchens clean
much easier and there are advances in other areas too.
There's a significant increase in the amount of food that's
- available...
- Oh, is there?
- So have a look in the cupboard.
- Quite a lot more processed branded food.
- Uh-huh.
So, lots of, sort of, tinned beef and pasta and beans and an awful
lot of meals which can just be opened from a can and served.
Yeah, you're right.
This is the era of technology coming into the kitchen to save labour.
You've got an electric kettle and an electric toaster, even a
great ham-fisted clutzy old bloke can make toast in a thing like that.
Yeah, I'm not sure how much he would make toast, cos, obviously,
it's better if you can get someone else to do it for you.
And what's Rochelle going to do with all this free time?
Well, although she's got the gadgets,
although she's got the convenience food, she's still spending
seven to nine hours a day cleaning and cooking and making sure
the kitchen keeps looking as perfect and pristine as it does now.
After her 1950s experience, kitchen drudgery will come as no surprise to
Rochelle, who worked 11 hours a day to feed and look after her family.
15-year-old Ros and big sister, Miranda, were expected to
follow in their mum's footsteps.
And university lecturer, Brandon became a classic '50s dad,
waited on at every meal.
Now it's time for the Robshaws to step into the '60s.
I want to see what happens next,
I want to see how the role might expand.
I'm really looking forward to having more interesting foods,
having a little bit more freedom.
I'm looking forward to the '60s.
I'm hoping that I'll have a chance to be in the kitchen.
For six weeks, the Robshaws are swapping their modern
diet for the food of the past.
This time they're eating strictly '60s style,
with every day bringing a new year and a new experience.
Whoa!
It looks like I'm dead and stuffed!
We've got a TV. Wow! Oh, gosh, that's just like the one I had.
Ah, we've got some singles, as well.
Oh, The Beatles.
Singles were small.
It does feel lounge-y, doesn't it?
- That's cos it's a...
- Lounge!
Oh, my goodness! Oh, my goodness!
This is just brilliant!
It's so much brighter than the '50s, isn't it?
And it's fitted, it's fitted.
All these surfaces are very shiny, aren't they? Shiny and new.
In fact, it's hurting my eyes a bit.
Oh, isn't that clever, a hand-held blender than we've got here.
- Wow!
- Ooh!
There's considerably more in there than in the '50s.
That is the food cupboard of a more affluent society.
What I'm looking for and what I can't see, is the fridge.
So I'm still quite surprised that it's 1960
and there isn't a fridge, not even a tiny, tiny fridge.
Wey-hey. Welcome to the '60s.
And you all look amazing. I've never seen so much polyester in one place.
It is, sort of, fairly scary
if you get too close to this new toaster, you might melt.
What do you think's going be best about the '60s?
More sweets.
More sweets, that's true. And there'll be more sugar.
That's a fairly key thing, you can probably get chocolate bars
and various kinds of sweets.
And as you know, I've got your manual here and it's going to be
all about the national food survey and what people were really eating.
Each year, from 1940 to 2000, thousands of families
recorded every meal they ate over the course of a week
for the national food survey, providing an extraordinary
window into Britain's changing eating habits.
The survey will guide the Robshaws through their 1960s diet.
So what sort of meals are you expecting?
Well I'd kind of hoped as the '60s goes on, we might get some
more adventurous kind of foods, you know, like foreign foods.
And what about you?
More flavour, cos really the only flavour in the
'50s was like salt and pepper. That's not really a flavour.
It's not that exciting yet.
It's gammon and Brussels sprouts and stewing steak and potatoes
and sort of, you know, fairly straightforward ingredients.
Quite a lot of cooking.
It's about making your kitchen the lair of a domestic goddess.
Do you think you're up to that?
Well, I'll give it my best shot.
Like 70% of married women in 1960, Rochelle will be a full-time
housewife, while Brandon's kitchen duties are limited to tea making.
It's really nice you're making me a cup of tea, Brandon.
Well, that's all right, darling.
I've waited ten years.
Well, everything comes to her who waits.
It's time to cook dinner and Rochelle and Miranda
are lifting the menu straight out of the national food survey.
OK, this is a family.
Mum, 32, dad, 41, daughter, 13,
daughter, 11, son, nine, and a daughter of seven.
In Bradford north in 1960.
Tea, corned beef hash, rice pudding, tea, milk and sugar.
Why doesn't it open? Why doesn't it...?
I'm not giving up.
This is the modern world now, isn't it? Oh!
Right, this time, I have this.
No tin is safe now.
Don't need this stupid key.
Right, we're just having vegetables.
Tinned meat was cheap and with food prices much higher than
they are today, it was a 1960s family staple.
The national food survey shows that families spent 28% of their
weekly income on food, compared to as little as 12% today.
- God, it looks actually horrible.
- Yeah.
Rice pudding was a big thing of my childhood.
I do think it's a good way to use up milk before it, sort of, goes off.
But I don't know if mum did it cos we didn't have a fridge,
I don't know.
Maybe that's why a fridge means such a lot to me.
Oh, that looks nice and colourful.
It does, it smells good.
This was made by a woman in Bradford.
I like the vegetables, but I don't like the meat.
- What, you don't like this lovely corned beef?
- No.
You could actually have this in the '50s. Yeah.
It's kind of the same.
There's been so sudden dramatic change.
Same dinner, different dinner time.
In the '50s, most people had taken their main meal at midday, but
in the '60s, more families shifted this meal to the early evening.
That is another important social change, isn't it?
The fact that now, in the '60s we're all sitting eating together.
You're not, kind of, eating, behind my back like you did in the '50s.
I didn't eat behind your back.
I feel impressed with my new kitchen, I think it looks modern.
But I'm still in it.
I'd be more impressed with my kitchen if I wasn't in it.
To be honest, maybe it was good you being in the kitchen for longer,
because you can learn how to open the cans.
The first meal we've had was pretty '50s, which you expect
because it didn't just change overnight,
but I hope that there'll be a much wider range of foods soon.
It's a new day which means a new year for the Robshaws.
So I've got one or two things here to make breakfast
- a bit more exciting.
- Tony, the tiger!
Coco Pops 1961, that appeared.
Do you want to have a butchers at the Coco Pops which comes with
- an exciting toy?
- I just want that toy.
Yeah, go on, you try and find it. The toy's not actually in there.
You only need to collect 15 tokens, which, in your case,
it'll be about 1985 by the time we get to the toy.
The reason that people started eating these things,
was because advertisers cottoned on, at that stage,
that the person to go for was the kids. You know, you lot.
Hush, hush, what can you hear? You can't hear...
By targeting children directly, '60s cereal ads were playing a new
marketing game - pester power.
Rice Krispies, they're saying,
"We're fresh and we're crisp and we're nice Rice Krispies."
In the national food survey, there's strong evidence that people
were eating cereal for supper quite a lot, which is just sort of
what you do with a new food, that you've got to eat it all the time.
- Can we do that?
- No.
- Why not?
- Yeah, dad, why not?
- You're being stern 1950s dad.
Yeah, I'm being a bit austere.
Britain's cereal consumption soared by 47% over the decade,
along with children's sugar intake.
- That's enough, Fred.
- He's having a second bowl.
Are you eating because you're hungry,
as people had done for the whole of human history up to this point,
or are you eating because this stuff is being sold to you hard
- with cartoon characters and lots of sugar?
- Second one.
So it's not just sugary cereal that people got at breakfast.
They got a new kind of bread.
This is squishy, white, sliced bread made by the Chorleywood process.
In 1961, baking scientists at Chorleywood, Hertfordshire,
redesigned the humble loaf.
By adding extra yeast, fat and additives
and kneading the dough in high speed mixers, they slashed traditional
production times and created soft loaves that stayed fresh for days.
An instant hit, today, 80% of British bread,
brown and white, is made using the Chorleywood process.
You can imagine someone, you know, arriving home in 1962,
opening it up, wow, it's already sliced, it's really squishy,
it's really sweet, easy to put in the toaster.
It does look modern.
It's the sort of bread you'd take into space.
Yes. If I was taking a sandwich into space, yeah.
- Which they had to!
- Through the helmet, like that.
- So, do you want to eat some?
- Yeah.
- Go on, tuck in.
The thing about this bread, though, it does make good toast, doesn't it?
How do you feel about the end of your daily walk to the baker's shop?
What am I replacing it with? What am I doing?
Cleaning. Yeah, maybe I'm doing more cleaning.
But there's no housework today.
I've arranged for Brandon and Rochelle to dine out at a restaurant
for the first time since their time-travelling adventure began.
What do you think of the motor, then?
- I think it's lovely, Brandon.
- It's beautiful, yeah.
- Yeah.
Before the 1960s, eating out usually meant a simple meal at a pub
or a fish and chip shop.
High quality restaurants were few.
The 1961 Good Food Guide listed only 70 outside London.
But with a third of households now car owners and families enjoying
more disposable income, Britain's dining out habits were changing.
Hello!
Brandon's sister, Glynis, and her partner, Matt,
are sharing this foray into fine dining 1961 style at,
of all places, Newport Pagnell service station.
And welcome to glamorous dining 1961.
Hello, shall we go through?
Polly will be their hostess with the mostest.
Back in 1961 when motorways were only three-years-old,
service stations were chic destinations,
complete with silver service restaurants.
So were you surprised being dropped off here, Rochelle?
Yeah, I was.
I mean, I could imagine going to, like, a Little Chef,
but I didn't, sort of, like equate that with a fine dining experience.
Well, in 1961, this was somewhere to come in your car on your modern
motorway to, sort of, display that you're part of the modern world.
This is the 1961 Newport Pagnell version of wine,
which disappointingly for you is non-alcoholic,
because service stations were not given licenses by local
authorities even though there were no drink-drive laws at the time.
So this would have been disappointing for people
coming out to dine here when they would have been used to
getting tanked up before having a nice drive.
- Enjoy the wine.
- Thank you. Cheers everybody.
- Cheers.
- Cheers, guys.
- Cheers, thanks, Brandon.
That's your meal, probably the best meal you've ever
had in a service station, I should think. Enjoy your meal.
- Lovely, thank you.
- Thank you.
The last time I got taken to a service station,
I got an Eccles cake.
- So this is better?
- This is better.
- Vastly superior.
It does feel quite a, sort of, grand experience.
I'm really enjoying it.
Well, it was a rare treat I would have thought.
But it's meat with two veg. People are going out to, sort of,
eat familiar food that they could have had at home.
It's acceptable to the British palate, isn't it?
It's not challenging.
- But it was very nice, wasn't it?
- It's lovely.
Fine dining continued to increase in popularity throughout the '60s
and by 1969, the number of fancy restaurants listed in the
Good Food Guide had nearly quadrupled.
What do you think?
- Well, is this the sort of thing you'd now expect at home?
- Well, yeah.
In an ideal world, yeah this is where I'm setting the bar.
Just got back from the service station for a meal
and it struck me that it must be like people going up
the shard these days and having a fantastic experience there.
It must have felt so modern.
It's a new year and I'm sending the Robshaws the kitchen
appliance of their dreams, courtesy of a chef who remembers
the day in 1962, when this gadget changed his family's life.
- Hello.
- Oh, wow!
- You must be Brandon!
- Yes, I am.
- You look great!
- Thanks very much.
- I'm Dave.
- Are you Dave the hairy biker?
- Yeah!
- Welcome, come in.
Yeah, can't wait to see your kitchen.
- Hello! Rochelle?
- Yes, it is.
- Dave.
- Hi, Dave.
- Pleased to meet you.
- Hi.
- This must be Miranda? Hello, Dave, pleased to meet you.
- Gosh, this is a complete time capsule, isn't it?
- Yeah.
It certainly is, yes.
- Oh, show us your pantry.
- Oh, excuse me!
Funnily enough, it doesn't bring back too many memories
because I grew up in a two-up, two-down,
so my kitchen in 1962 was a bit primitive compared to this one.
I was five-years-old and there was an event that happened
that changed all our lives and I think, you know,
we can do a bit more updating in this kitchen.
Do you want to go and get Rosalind and Fred?
Yeah, will do, OK. Fred! Ros!
Look, Fred, look who's here.
Well, have I got a surprise for you lot.
Go on, cover your eyes up!
- Ta-da!
- Oh!
- Oh, wow.
- Isn't it lovely?
- Oh, my goodness me.
- That's nice.
- That's so cool.
- Cheese.
- Oh, look at that.
It's really going to revolutionise my life.
Well, you're part of the lucky few, because in 1962 there was only
one household in three had a refrigerator.
I'll tell you what though, this looks over to you, Brandon,
- being the man of the house.
- I think this is a job for the man, isn't it?
Rochelle, do you want to come with me and we'll discuss
- the art of cold cookery.
- Oh, yes, please.
And we'll leave Brandon to wrestle with this.
- Get your bike revved up.
- See you later.
All right, have fun.
So, now we've got to work out how to get that in there.
Will it, actually...
It won't actually... Will it fit?
It's fine there.
Rochelle's fridge comes with its very own cookbook,
a guide to making the most of this exciting new appliance.
What do you fancy choosing?
Well, I quite like the idea of the garland of peas,
cos I like the idea of a garland of peas, and the lamb in mint jelly.
There's green food colouring in that,
so it's going to look a pretty psychedelic table.
Right, so it's all going to be a green menu.
- Look at that.
- It's a bit of a clash.
It's like Kew Gardens, innit?
Right, we need... So shall we do everything as per the recipes
- and just see what...?
- Yes.
I'll get the lamb and chop it up.
That's it. Shall I drain it?
Oh, yes, please. Oh, they're funny looking peas, aren't they?
Tinned peas. They'll go in then.
Peas go in ring.
How many would this have fed? Oh, oh!
Let's just all pour the peas down the hole. Hold on.
Both of tonight's dishes involve gelatine,
a setting agent that's quite hard to use without a fridge.
Put it under the freezer where it's colder,
my mother used to always say.
Oh, it is cold, yeah.
Rochelle, you're going to love this device.
Now it's the '60s,
now all you've got to do is sit around for three hours while it sets.
- How do you feel?
- Well, I think to myself, what will I do?
What will I do in that time?
Perhaps I'll read a magazine or perhaps I'll crochet myself
a jumper or something.
So, maybe, the fridge is what brought women's liberation?
You get a fridge and then you burn your bra!
That's it. In the fridge, it would take a long time...
Well, the pop man used to come once a week
and now you've got a fridge, your pop will never be warm.
How cool's that?
- Cheers, guys.
- Cheers.
Ew!
Maybe it'll taste nicer than it looks.
We used to make lollies out of this in the new fridge.
- Whoa!
- Urgh!
- What is that, Rochelle?
- Dog food?
- No.
- What is appearing?!
- Smells like dog food. - It's a pea ring.
Actually smells like dog food.
And what's that?
This is from the cookbook.
It's show-off food, it's food with a bit of pizzazz.
- Oh, my God, that's weird. - Look at that.
- That's fantastic.
- So you could never eat this
- before you had a refrigerator.
- That's true.
- We'll be able to eat this all the time now.
- Yeah.
- It's tasty.
- I'm not a fan of the jelly, though.
Like, at all.
I would certainly eat it again,
but it's probably quite a lot of effort to prepare, isn't it?
Surprisingly not. It's absolutely no effort whatsoever.
Even though the food was pretty strange,
it was still pretty British.
Mint, maybe some lemon, you know, it wasn't
very exotic and I think my palate does want a change.
It's '62, come on, can we not get some flavour?!
# When the moon hits your eye
# Like a big pizza pie that's amore... #
Ros, what does it say for 1963 national food surveys?
Oh, that's so cool. Spaghetti bolognese.
Ooh, fantastic.
I guess it's our first foreign dish, isn't it?
It doesn't feel foreign, though.
Now it just feels kind of normal, but then it would have been exotic.
An upsurge in package holidays to the Mediterranean, kick-started
Britain's appetite for foreign cuisine.
By 1963, over 3.5 million people were heading
south annually for sun, fun and a whiff of exotic food.
# When the stars make you drool
# Just like a pasta e fasuli that's amore... #
Back home, Elizabeth David's classic book on Mediterranean food
inspired adventurous cooks to recreate these flavours.
1950, that was first published.
In the '50s, it would have been out of my league to, sort of, make
this kind of food.
I don't think I would have had access to the ingredients.
By 1964, all David's books were available in paperback
and the ingredients were becoming more accessible too,
although keen housewives still had to be resourceful.
Olive oil was commonly used to treat earache
and most easily found at a chemists.
And buying Parmesan cheese
and garlic meant a trip to an Italian deli.
It's interesting to be making something that's not British
and the fact that, you know, I'd have to go into, like, Soho or
the west end to actually get hold of the ingredients, would be
a really, really big, you know, thing to be doing.
Today, it's Miranda who's venturing into Soho.
In 1963, the majority of teenage girls left school at 15
and in a golden age of nearly full employment,
most walked straight into full-time jobs.
17-year-old Miranda is about to start a shift at one
of Britain's new, hip '60s hang-outs, an Italian coffee bar.
Black Americano.
There are two different generations going on at the moment.
There's my mum who's still in the kitchen,
then there's her daughter, me, and I have much more freedom.
'60s teenagers had money too.
A massive 70% of their wages was disposable income,
more than at any time before or since, which they spent
freely on music, fashion and going out, creating a new youth culture.
This is yours, this is mine, shall we?
- Urgh!
- Mmm, what do you think of that?
- The first time drinking espresso?
- It's really horrible.
- Really? Oh, my God!
- OMG!
You've had coffee before?
Yeah, I've had coffee but it's really strong.
- Well, that's why it's espresso.
- OMG!
OK, cafe latte, small takeaway.
Even to me, having been born in the '90s,
that cup of coffee was like nothing I've ever tasted.
I was like, whoa!
That's probably what latched people onto it,
cos it's such a different flavour.
Back home, Rochelle's also stirring up a pot full of foreign flavour.
She's following in the footsteps of one of the national food
survey's more adventurous cooks,
a 48-year-old mother of two from the posh London suburb of Twickenham.
Supper - spaghetti bolognese, home-made cake, tea, milk and sugar.
There is now the sort of range of flavours that I'm using which
I haven't been using, sort of, before.
Like particularly the garlic and the basil and the olive oil
and the spaghetti, of course, and the Parmesan.
Actually, half of it.
Ooh! Bolognese!
- Oh, wow.
- Got to say that looks...
It's spaghetti! Is it spaghetti bolognese?
- Yes,
- it is. I'm just so excited.
- Are you?
- I really am.
But wait a minute, Fred, wait till we've...
We've got to wait. But, honestly, my mouth is watering.
- Can we start?
- Can we start?
I hope it's nice.
It's lovely.
Do you think it's lovely, because it's the first meal
we've had that tastes different?
Yeah. Olive oil, garlic, Parmesan cheese.
- And spaghetti.
- Lovely rich flavours, aren't they?
- Yeah.
- And they're flavours we haven't had.
- Yeah.
- For the last 12 years.
- Yes.
I can see why this became a typical British family favourite.
That's how good it is, people are actually scraping the dish.
I can imagine just eating boring food and then to suddenly have that,
must have been amazing, it must have been a taste revolution.
And I think from here on in, is the start of more interesting foods.
I feel like the '60s have really begun and it does feel like a big
shift from the early '60s and the '50s now.
Another day, another year.
Time for the revolution in what we ate
and where it came from, to really get going.
Until 1964, food suppliers controlled the price of their goods,
so wherever you shopped, the cost of food was broadly the same.
But the Resale Prices Act passed in this year, abolished
the suppliers' control and price wars began.
This gave real advantage to big buyers, ie supermarkets.
They were able to drive down prices.
It meant that small buyers,
individual retailers could not compete.
Prior to 1964, supermarkets were thin on the ground
and Rochelle has used only small local shops.
Until now.
- Hi.
- Great to see you.
- Yeah, you too.
Welcome to shopping 1960s style, a completely new experience.
- I've got a shopping list.
- Yes, at the minute, it's small,
but it might grow as I walk round the aisles.
Yeah, you'll be tempted by all the new products. OK?
Better take a wire basket.
There's just so much to look at, isn't there?
Isn't there just so much to look at.
It's absolutely extraordinary.
Given Rochelle's experience in the '50s, I think
she's going to enjoy being able to make her own choices,
having the freedom to take what she wants.
Does this feel really different?
Well, yeah, because when I went to the local shops
and asked for whatever you wanted and they'd bring it to you,
but this way, I am actually choosing what I want myself.
There's so much choice. Yay!
No, you're being silly now.
- That's silly.
- I'm going to stock up.
I'm guessing we're going to be able to keep about 1% of this.
And already I'm feeling tempted by other items that
I might not have bought.
So that means things like this.
I think, oh, maybe I'll buy that as well since I'm here.
Does this bring back any memories of going shopping when you were a kid?
- Well, I remember going to the first big supermarket with my mum.
- Do you?
- Yeah, I do.
- It must have looked really dazzling
- the fact that you weren't used to it.
- Yeah.
If you've just been going to a corner shop where you know
the person inside the shop and they're saying, you know,
"This is what I've got for you today, Mrs Robshaw,"
or, you know, "This is your usual."
And then suddenly there's nobody to give you your usual.
Usual is it? In the back room?
Tesco and Sainsbury's were at the forefront of Britain's 1960s
self-service boom, when numbers of supermarket stores shot up from
fewer than 600 to nearly 3,500 by the end of the decade.
At the same time, a fifth of independent grocers closed,
unable to compete with the choice
and prices on offer in the supermarket aisles.
- Hey, look what I've found. Frozen chicken.
- Wow.
Look at that, that's the first time we've had it in this experience.
It is.
Supermarkets didn't just supply the demand, sometimes they created it
by making once unattainable foods, affordable for all.
Not many years ago the chicken was an expensive
luxury for special occasions only.
But today, it's an easily available
and comparatively cheap food ready to be popped into the oven.
Chicken became an everyday item in the '60s after Sainsbury's
engaged a handful of poultry suppliers to transform
small-scale British chicken farming into a massive industry.
I'm meeting John Maunder, one of the original suppliers
challenged by Sainsbury's to up production.
The introduction to volume production of chicken was
an American idea brought over to this country by Sainsbury directors.
They saw the opportunity of a pre-packaged product
such as a whole chicken, as being something that would
fit in to this new style of supermarket, self-service store.
And they led you to believe that as many chickens as you could
- produce, they could sell?
- Yes.
The concept was, that if we produced it in large enough quantities,
we could reduce the unit price.
If we reduced the unit price, then people would be able to
afford it and if they could afford it, they would buy more of it.
And it was true, of course, because no sooner had
we offered these affordable chicken, the demand grew.
The new cheap chicken cost a third less and sales leapt from
ten million chickens a year to 150 million in the space of a decade.
And our love affair with chicken has continued to grow.
Today, Britons eat around 800 million annually,
accounting for more than half our total meat consumption.
Closer to home, there was another source
of culinary inspiration - television,
as millions tuned into watch Fanny Cradock take the nation's
cooking skills in hand.
Jenny, do you know how to cook chips?
Oh, yes, you just prepare the chips and fry them in boiling fat.
- It's entertaining, isn't it?
- Yes, it's like '60s Nigella.
- Yeah.
You must have an increased amount of leisure in order to, sort of,
sit and watch this.
Later in the series, her husband, Johnnie, used to appear
and he used to be like her, sort of, kitchen helper,
but she just kind of like bossed him about.
Where are my egg whites?
- Tried looking?
- Well, since you're here,
will you pour them into the bowl for me, please?
Right.
Now vanish.
And so on with the lot.
Bossy, but much-loved, Fanny was Britain's first TV celebrity chef.
TV chefs are able to, sort of, get in this gap in the market
because everyone's got a little bit more food and more
labour-saving gadgets and they're like, "Oh what can I do with it?"
And now there's this gap and TV chefs can come in and be like,
"Yes, I can show you how."
Since the start of this experiment in 1950,
the Robshaws have been locked into the stereotypical roles of the past.
Dad brings home the bacon...
..and mum cooks it.
But a big screen icon was sowing the seeds of change.
In 1965, Michael Caine played spy
and gourmet Harry Palmer in the hit film, The Ipcress File.
In Palmer's hands, food was the ultimate tool of seduction,
which helped entice men into the kitchen.
I'm here to initiate Brandon into the joys of the culinary arts.
This is a moment where we're going to have a slight
revolution and things.
So, this is going to be your first crack at cooking something.
Brilliant. I feel absolutely delighted.
I'm really looking forward to cooking.
You're going to make a two-course meal for Rochelle,
who's going to disappear and do something feminine.
Oh! Oh, good luck in the kitchen...
- Thanks very much.
- ..with your gadget.
- Thank you.
Excellent.
In their modern lives, Brandon regularly cooks family meals,
but tonight's menu is very much dinner a deux.
Blended vegetable soup. Chicken in a creamy sauce. Fresh asparagus.
Potatoes, white wine.
OK, so have a chop of that.
There's no directions on, you know, how to chop it up, so...
You're not going to even peel the onion?
What do you suppose your father would have been
doing in the kitchen in 1965?
Oh, my dad couldn't do anything in the kitchen.
I think he made coffee sometimes.
He couldn't cook, he wasn't happy at all cooking,
so he never got into that.
He didn't know modern scientific things like peeling an onion?
- No, this isn't working as well as it...
- No, no, it's fine.
So, listen, all these clearly defined roles that we've got in
the '60s, has it been affecting your marriage in any way?
No. No, I don't think it has.
The only thing, I think, that it has affected, you know,
Rochelle has been saying that she does actually need to spend
less time in the kitchen now.
So she's becoming dissatisfied as a result of things improving?
In a sense, I think she is.
I think she's just thinking, well, I've got all this time
on my hands, I could do something, you know, more interesting.
Rochelle, what would you like me to do to your hair today?
Well, I think I probably would like to go high.
Yeah, I just... As high as you can get it.
- Right. Like Dusty high?
- Dusty, high, yeah, yeah.
- OK.
In the '50s, women's magazines had focused on dispensing
housekeeping advice.
Now beauty tips were just as important.
Between 1959 and 1966, the value of Britain's beauty market
soared by 165% and many women used the housekeeping time
they were saving, to make regular trips to the hairdresser.
Roles and stuff are changing,
like in the '50s you wouldn't have just been sitting in a salon
having your hair done and you're doing that now.
She's getting her hair done, she's not working.
- No, she's getting her hair done.
- Yeah.
It's just having leisure time.
Yeah, leisure time to make herself look good for Dad.
Not to, sort of, go out and be her own woman.
Do you think, I mean, probably then, as now, that cooking's
different for men than it is for women?
Yes, I suppose so.
I think that when men cook, they're showing off and I think
when women cook, then they're not doing it to be impressive
they're just doing it to put a meal on the table.
- That will certainly have been true of then...
- Yeah.
The idea that the men...
I think, you know, that the man would cook some delicious,
sort of, chicken in a velvety sauce with a glass of wine
- and he's expecting something in return.
- That's right.
- I think we know what it is.
- I think we know what it is!
These styles were sometimes known as marriage-wreckers
because once you're in bed, you don't want to mess your hair up.
I wonder what Brandon will think of that
after he's cooked a nice dinner.
He won't cook again, will he?
I'll have another ten years in the kitchen
because I changed my hairstyle.
- OK, you ready to see it? It looks amazing.
- I'm ready.
- Look.
- Oh, my goodness me! That's absolutely fantastic!
Wow, no, I can understand why they're called marriage wreckers.
No-one's getting their hands on this.
Don't want to mess that up, yeah.
# The look of love... #
- So here's to your success in the kitchen.
- Cheers.
- Here's to your success in the hairdressers.
- Yeah.
Where'd you go, anyway?
Oh, I went to a little place round the corner.
How did you find the kitchen?
I actually found it hard work.
That cooker's not that easy to use, there's only two rings really
you can use and they just get super-hot.
I am actually really impressed with how you've dealt with all that,
just got on and cooked some great meals.
I think that's really what women do though, isn't it?
- That's what women do.
- They don't start complaining about the cooker.
You're right, whereas I've just spent ten minutes going on
and on about what I...
- I'm going to go and get the soup now.
- Right, OK.
Oh, I haven't taken this off yet.
POTS CRASH
Brandon! You all right?
Very, very nice to have a meal cooked for me for, sort of,
after what feels like it's been like a really, really long time.
- Do you want me to serve you?
- Yeah, please, yeah.
I've been feeling still quite pulled down by the kitchen
and getting my hair done and then coming back and somebody
actually doing something for you, did have this enormous lifting effect.
- Look at that.
- It's ages since I've had an After Eight.
So sophisticated, isn't it? Who knows what will happen after eight?
A new day and a new year.
It's 1966 and like 32 million people across the UK, the Robshaws
are getting ready to watch England play Germany in the World Cup final.
That looks good.
To help them celebrate the occasion, I've sent another
'60s food forged in the white heat of technology.
Ew, it's meat!
- Oh, my goodness, yes.
- Oh, my goodness!
These are Vesta meals.
These are dried meals that you can make in 20 minutes.
There's loads of 'em!
It's a totally new kind of food, isn't it?
This is the chef...
and cook the paella and it took him four hours.
Vesta meals used a technology first developed for army rations.
Food was freeze-dried into tiny pieces that only needed water
and heat to reconstitute.
This is the wife who cooked and served that wonderful Vesta
paella and she did it all in 20 minutes.
An instant meal and an instant hit.
In 1966, Sainsbury's alone sold nearly half a million boxes.
Look at that, that's our meal.
It's not cooking, it's opening and stirring.
Yeah.
Right. It's modern, it's clean, it's like...
It just seems fast, like a really fast transition.
- What's that?
- Oh.
And the type of food we were cooking and now suddenly we're doing this.
- It happened quite fast.
- That's Bobby Moore there.
There's two Bobbys?
Rochelle and Miranda are preparing beef curry and chicken chow mein
for six, as Fred's cousin, Joe, has joined them for the match.
For many British people, Vesta meals provided their first
taste of non-European food.
And look, that's how I remember it. Look at that!
Look at them!
- Look, look! Look at them, have you seen 'em?
- Yeah.
Look at it, seriously! That has just made my day.
Supposed to be convenience food, it's not very convenient for me.
It'd be more convenient for me to make a sandwich.
No, but the thing is, it's probably quicker than any food
they had then, even though it takes, like, half an hour.
I must say this is the longest 20 minutes I've ever sat through.
There's Bobby Moore, look.
How could we mess up a Vesta meal?
Look, that needs to be in a different pan, doesn't it?
I didn't realise it could be so complicated.
Well, the match will be over by the time this is served.
Looks quite nice though, doesn't it? Want to try a bit?
- Why not?
- I just don't.
- Why not?
- I just don't!
- Go on.
- No!
I bet you it's quite nice.
- Is it?
- No.
- Oh.
- Oh. Oh, wow.
- Thank you.
- It doesn't look as...
- Don't worry about that, just get it in here.
- What's...
- What have I got? Get off!
- Leave off!
We need to get Heidi out.
But it's not as nice as takeaway.
We didn't really have takeaways back in the '60s,
except for fish and chips.
Oh, look! What's that dog doin' in here?
< Miranda let the dog in.
What do you think of this meal?
I think the chow mein works better.
This beef curry is actually a little bit dry and powdery.
Are you disappointed?
I am disappointed, actually. Was it fun to cook?
Well, it took up a lot of pans, actually.
It doesn't look like an instant meal.
- It certainly wasn't instant in time.
- Exactly.
Missed half the match.
What? They've scored?
Did that ball cross the line? They've given the goal.
From my angle, I could see that that didn't go in.
< Mum can see round the TV!
I'm sitting on the side and I can see that, that didn't go in.
It makes a change to be eating in front of the telly, though.
Don't you think it's a bit casual?
Just cos we've got used to sitting and eating round the table.
Now people aren't even listening to me when I talk.
What is more important, the World Cup,
a Vesta meal or what I'm about to say?
I just don't see how watching the World Cup final and eating,
how can that not be good?
Yeah, some people are on the pitch, they think it's all over!
It is now.
And he just scored at exactly the right moment.
Oh, my God. That's just amazing.
So that means they won fair and square after all.
Yeah, cos they got an extra goal that was legitimate.
Oh, I am pleased.
Honestly! I really feel quite relieved.
Increasingly, people were also enjoying international flavours
when they ate out.
Chinese restaurants designed their menus for the British palate,
offering omelette and chips alongside chop suey.
And they were the '60s runaway hit.
By the end of the decade, there were nearly 4,000 restaurants
nationwide, compared with only 300 just over a decade earlier.
Mmm. Mmm, mmm.
We went to a Chinese restaurant which was really fun.
The food was nice, great colours and different shapes
and completely different from what we'd been having.
The change within 15, 16 years, is enormous.
The sense of the foreign, which was completely
absent from the food of the '50s.
Can you hear that?
- They're doing it.
- A bit.
- They're doing it.
TELEPHONE RINGS
Hello? Yeah, hi.
Bye.
What was the message?
It was a message from Giles. You'll never guess. Want to guess?
- OK, I'm moving out.
- Leave it out!
- I am.
- No, you're not.
- I am!
- You're not!
Where are you going? I feel like crying.
How can you just tell us this over the table?!
What have we done to make you want to go?
We're not good enough for you?
You're just going to pack a bag and like walk out?
You're not pregnant are you?
La, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la!
By the late '60s, the social and sexual rule book was being torn up
and many young people were leading lives unimaginable to their parents.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is London.
Swinging London it's been called,
though some people might find a different adjective.
Magazines encouraged women as young as 16 to leave home
and live independently and landlords happily split large
houses into bedsits to accommodate them.
Ros has come to help Miranda settle into her new bedsit.
- Oh, it's really nice.
- It's so nice.
- Ah, this is so cool.
- It's lovely.
- Oh, is this the cooker?
- Cool!
- Oh, my God, that looks dangerous.
You can make fried eggs. Oh, look at this.
That's good.
Oh, I've just moved in and you've already started destroying it.
I know how to put it back up, don't worry.
Well, you do it then.
- Where are you going to put the milk?
- I have no idea.
Maybe we just put it out the window.
You don't put milk out the window!
- I reckon it's better off out there than in here.
- No, it's not.
You're stupid and I don't care if you get milk poisoning.
So, what do you want to make tonight?
If the shops are shut, we can only use the stuff we've got
and we haven't got very much.
With no more than a single ring to cook on,
life in a '60s bedsit didn't always swing.
I've arranged for Katharine Whitehorn,
author of bestselling '60s bedsit survival guide,
Kitchen In The Corner, to share some tips.
There was no question of having a fridge anywhere near, you
had to keep the milk more or less cool out on the windowsill, which
was all right, unless it got knocked over by a pigeon or something.
I don't know whether you're thinking of doing much
- cooking in your bedsitter?
- Yeah, we are really.
We were going to have some people over for dinner tonight,
but we don't know what to cook.
What kind of food do you like cooking?
Or perhaps I should say, like eating best?
In our bag of things, we've got a lot of vegetables.
- Oh, that's terrific.
- Yeah.
You could make a ratatouille out of that.
You cook everything together in one pot.
Did you find that because there weren't as many takeaways,
that you were forced to do more cooking?
Mostly, if you wanted to eat you had to cook it,
however badly you did it.
And everybody is going to be so amazingly impressed that
you've managed to cook them anything at all, that, if it isn't quite
as marvellous as if they'd taken you to the Ritz, it doesn't matter.
- Two onions.
- Yeah.
Two pimentos.
The girls are following Katharine's recipe for one-pot ratatouille,
a nod to Britain's growing confidence with foreign food
which doesn't create much washing up.
What I'm not really too keen on, is the fact that we're
cooking in my bedroom.
I don't like that idea and in future, I really don't think I'll
cook, sort of, onions and garlic as an evening meal.
Or even at all, because why would you want that in
- where you're about to sleep?
- I know.
It just seems so dangerous to have this little, like, fire thing here.
If you were a teenager in the '60s, it would be something very
desirable, to do the whole bedsit thing.
I feel much more independent than I did in the '50s.
There's a massive difference, it's like two different lives.
For me, I don't think this has been a terrifically good decade.
The world feels that it is changing very, very fast
and not for people of my generation.
I think as a woman in the '60s in middle age,
it does feel like a very defunct position to be in.
- So cool.
- So what's cooking?
- It's ratatouille.
Cool! Awesome.
Yeah, and I'm actually really proud of us
because we cooked it in that, on that, with that.
I'm just curious to know, though, how many people would have actually
- bothered to make a ratatouille in their bedsit.
- It's nice.
- It is nice, actually.
- Is this the bread?
- Yes.
- That's cool packaging. Urgh, it's mouldy!
- Did you know it was mouldy?
- No!
You're a terrible host.
I've had it since 1962, so, to be honest, it kept pretty well.
The family are seeing the swinging '60s out in style with a
party celebrating Britain's growing hunger for all things foreign.
It's in honour of an event celebrating European harmony that
began only 11 years after World War II,
the Eurovision Song Contest.
And in 1969, British hopes are pinned on Lulu
and her Boom Bang A Bang.
- Hello Robshaws, hi.
- Hi, Giles.
Nice to see you, I'm glad the '60s have changed hugely
- the role of the women in the home.
- As you can see, yep.
Your hair is having an exciting time.
My hair is really having a great time, yeah.
I'm keeping the lacquer business in business, yeah.
- So you're coming to the Eurovision party?
- I'll come to the party.
I'll drink whatever fancy foreign cocktails you're making
- and have a sniff, at least, of the canapes.
- Can I get a cocktail?
Yes, you can have lots and lots of alcohol,
cos in 1969, there was a special exemption for ten-year-old boys.
- Wa-hey!
- Can't wait.
Every Eurovision buffet dish comes from a popular cookbook of the day.
Everything in the '60s moved very fast.
It moved fast when we were living it, compared to the '50s
and I think that's just because there's a lot more to do.
- Hello.
- Hi. Hi, Polly.
- How are you?
- All right, thank you.
Getting ready for a party?
Yes and you've arrived just in the nick of time.
- We have got, it's a, like, Europe theme.
- Right.
So for Spain, we have, like, devilled eggs
which is just eggs with mayonnaise in, I think.
So what's the authentic Spanish ingredient that you put in it?
- Paprika.
- Anything else?
- Nothing else.
So have you started to see in the '60s,
more influence of foreign food?
Yeah, went out for a Chinese, a couple of years ago.
And we had spaghetti bolognese, that was really nice.
Even though we'd only been living in the '50s
and '60s for not very long, all the change,
it felt exciting, it was just nice to just have new flavours.
Isn't that a cheerful sound?
- Hello.
- Hello!
- Oh, hello.
- Oh, my!
- So how was the decade for you?
Yeah, I think after the greyness of the '50s,
it just felt like everything had kind of sprung to life.
We're becoming more Europeanised.
I do feel just a general, sort of, broadening of horizons,
which is good.
And what about Fred? I mean, how's he coping?
I think he found the '60s easier than the '50s.
He's always been energetic, perhaps a bit hyper
and he was probably more so in the '60s.
Now I don't know whether that was because the clothes themselves
were sort of more informal and casual or whether it was the food.
There's a lot more sugar in his diet.
The 1960s saw the beginning of Britain's love affair with sugar.
The National Food Survey reveals that our consumption
of biscuits, cakes and pastries soared and we sprinkled
nearly half a kilo of sugar on our food and drinks every week.
And how's it been for you generally, the '60s, Rochelle? Can you tell me?
I've personally found the '60s really hard.
Whereas the '50s was about labour and about working,
here in the '60s, you've got these gadgets, you've got the free time
and you don't quite know what you're going to be doing with the free time.
So, it's felt a very, sort of, uncomfortable decade for me.
# Boom bang-a-bang bang
# Boom bang-a-bang bang I love you... #
OK, look this is the results.
That's us!
I think Lulu's won!
Hooray, get in.
Ah, she's so cute!
So how do you think the '60s have been for the Robshaws?
Well, surprisingly, I think it's been great for the kids
and for Brandon, but really not great at all for Rochelle.
Why not? She's got a beehive, she's got flowery dresses.
What more could a woman ask?
I think she's feeling trapped and depressed and slightly oppressed.
You think it's actually grinding her down really, real Rochelle?
I think it is, actually, and I just think she feels a bit sidelined.
The biggest defining feature of the '60s for me, has been
the generational gap.
Because I really did feel like I was living a different
life to the one my mum was.
However glamorous she looked,
she was still in the kitchen cooking and that was her job.
This is the time for the young.
It's like kicking off everything that went before, it's a
totally different feel...
That anything is possible, except me getting out the kitchen.
Next time, the Robshaws groove into the 1970s.
- Oh.
- Oh.
I'm not really sure what it tastes like.
Where does the flour come out of? Oh!
Got flour that comes out of heads, pickled onions with faces.
It's like the whole kitchen is mocking me.