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1900 HOUSE (1999)
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A TV company called Wall-to-Wall were planning
to mark the upcoming Millennium by putting a real contemporary
family into a painstakingly recreated Victorian house. They
would then live as Victorians for three months and their progress
would be followed day and night by TV cameras. In February 1999
this sounded like a pretty wacky idea. Little did I realise
that I'd just signed up to document the first major Reality
TV show in the UK.
I met the Bowler family a couple of days after they'd moved
in. Father Paul was a wonderfully upbeat character, but it was
clear that the main interest of the story was going to be mother
Joyce. She was the most passionate about the experiment and
eager to be completely open about every detail of her experience.
I left the house carrying photocopies of her ever-revealing
diary, documenting the ups and downs that were to make the series
so compelling. I then spent the next couple of months trawling
through transcripts of the concealed 'video diaries', selecting
the best moments of their daily confessions to produce Three
Months in 1900: the Bowler's Experience of Victorian Life. (My
co-author Matthew Sturgis meanwhile got to work on the historical
chapters that make up the rest of the book.)
I hadn't intended a theme to emerge in these chapters, but it
did. It was Joyce's gradual realisation of how hard life was
for women before the labour-saving devices of the Twentieth
Century took over; which realisation led to a new interest in
women's rights and the history of the Suffragettes.
Used to books that take a year from delivery to publication
it was interesting for me to see the speed at which publishers
can move when they have to. 1900 House was conceived in February,
begun in April, delivered in July, copy-edited and laid out
a week later, and published a month after that. The success
of the October programmes made it a bestseller. Joyce and her
family had their fifteen minutes of being recognised in supermarkets
near Taunton, then the world moved on. But Reality TV wasn't
finished yet ... |
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