Electric Dreams
BBC 4
Upgrade Me
BBC 4
As a recovering technophobe (I take one day at a time), I was attracted by the new BBC 4 documentary series Electric Dreams. Part of the channel’s season devoted to all things techno, it sends a 21st century family back in time in order to watch them struggle with the primitive technology of the past. But this is not the Victorian farm or ancient Roman villa lately revived on our screens. This is recent history, starting with the 1970s, and then travelling by decade almost back to the present day. The idea is to demonstrate the ever-quickening pace of our high-tech Western culture (while wallowing shamelessly in nostalgia.)
The Sullivan-Barnes family from Surrey was therefore flushed out of a comfy, gadget-laden home and its members kitted out in the tank-tops, scenic shirts, platform shoes and Farrah Fawcett hairstyles of more than three decades ago. When they returned to their house, they found it horribly changed – shrunk to half the size and stripped of central heating, dishwasher, freezer, mobile phones and personal computers. Delighted as the family was by the (now trendy) orange and brown ‘70s wallpaper, they were underwhelmed by the black-and-white television showing re-runs of Pot Black and The Generation Game. The paterfamilias consoled himself by a reunion with the chopper bike of his childhood while the kids bounced gamely down the garden on their Spacehoppers. Mum voiced a forlorn hope that the whole experience would “bring the family closer together”. She soon changed her tune when she was left to struggle alone with the twin-tub while the rest of the family moaned about having “nothing to do.”
At least she had the ultimate weapon up her sleeve: sending the kids up to their rooms when they misbehaved. Icy cold and devoid of TV and addictive computer games, these ’70s bedrooms were punishment indeed. With each day of their ordeal equivalent to one year of the decade, however, the time-travellers soon started to cheer up. A Goblin Teasmade turned up on the doorstep, followed by a primitive chest freezer (serial killer model) and a groovy perspex music centre. All perfectly adequate, if you ask me, and easily revived by a team of white-coated repair boffins. As a matter of fact, I still have that model of gas cooker from their retro kitchen and parts of it still work. If I’m honest, though, I could no longer do without my ansafone, automatic washing machine, internet grocery delivery, Google and email. I have even caved in and bought a microwave oven. Maybe I’m not a proper technophobe at all.
I certainly couldn’t compete with the forest-dwelling, no-tech hippy interviewed by poet and novelist Simon Armitage for Upgrade Me. This one-off documentary from the same BBC 4 season ruminated on the modern compulsion to buy up each new model of mobile phone, TV and personal computer as soon as it hits the shops. Is it, wondered Armitage, just a way to upgrade our personal image and status? Keep up with the Joneses? Indeed it is, opined the programme’s obligatory tame psychologist.
In South Korea, Armitage encountered boffins working on a range of personal tracking devices for all the family. Back home, he interviewed eco hippies and watched mountains of redundant techno junk disappear into landfill. He admitted he loved his new iPhone, but he worried about the future. Would we carry on upgrading and discarding our electronic toys forever? A question, you suspect, that will also become redundant one of these days.
Helen Chappell
