From Fanny Cradock's petits fours to Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen's boudoirs, BBC Two has for the last 50 years been a guide to shifting lifestyle trends in contemporary Britain. In its mission to keep us informed, educated and entertained in all things domestic, the channel has gone mad for makeovers, finessed our food and planted ideas in our back gardens. This series takes a nostalgic and amusing trawl through the archives to see how BBC Two fared as tastemaker to the nation. And, piquantly narrated by Bake Off's Mel Giedroyc, it begins with the biggest lifestyle revolution of them all, the 60s, when the shock and the schlock of the new marched hand in brightly coloured hand. Featuring Alan Titchmarsh, Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen, Antony Worrall Thompson and Esther Rantzen.
Keeping track of lifestyle trends in the decade that style forgot was one of BBC Two's bigger challenges, as the deliciously arch narration of Bake Off's Mel Giedroyc reminds us in this amusing romp through the channel's archive. This, after all, was an era of dodgy fashion, stodgy food and bodged politics that had us running to escape into a world of stripped pine, country kitchens and Laura Ashley. But the programme shows that the 70s also resemble our own times - from house price inflation and soaring energy costs through to worries about the threat to 'real' food and environmental sustainability.
The series tracking 50 years of lifestyle and homemaking programmes on BBC Two heads into the 80s. This was the decade when more people would own their homes, when more money was spent on them and more time in them than ever before. And at the heart of this was a changing role for women, who were joining the workforce in greater numbers, throwing off the shackles of being traditional housewives. It was a time of dizzying domestic change: Ken Hom caused a culinary revolution through his time-saving wok; Jilly Goolden got us drinking wine around the kitchen table; and Keith Floyd took the drudgery out of cooking by making it into entertainment - and as a result got men at the stove for the first time. Not for nothing was no-nonsense dog trainer Barbara Woodhouse, who brought men and dogs alike to heel, one of the icons of the decade. Narrated by Bake-Off's very own no-nonsense Mel Giedroyc.
Reinvention is the key as the series concludes with the era that saw the biggest lifestyle changes of all to the home - the 90s and 00s. BBC Two was making over homes by chucking out the chintz, turning gardens into outside rooms and kitchens into pukka Jamie Oliver zones. But it didn't stop there. Soon there was a craze for decluttering and minimal living linked to the crazed flipping of homes in the mortgage-mad Noughties. Inevitably, a slew of programmes about buying and selling property, homes in the country and living abroad followed. The stars of this new era of makeover television, including Laurence Llewellyn Bowen, Diarmuid Gavin and Charlie Dimmock, are all on hand to try and explain how this bewilderingly fast reinvention of the very idea of home happened - and why it couldn't last. Narrated by Mel Giedroyc.
