Electric Dreams Review: Electrifying Stuff

ELECTRIC DREAMS: Tuesday 29th September, BBC4, 9pm

Power cuts. Pressure cookers. Wallpaper patterns so busy they threatened to irreversibly damage your frontal lobe.

Life was no picnic in the Seventies, as the Sullivan-Barnes discovered last night in Electric Dreams. This ordinary family from Reading gave up their iPhones, Wiis and other new-fangled 21st-century devices, and travelled back in time to a more primitive technological era where dishwashers hadn’t been invented yet, and people still thought radiograms were a pretty groovy idea.

Unsurprisingly, their son Hamish wasn’t happy. Instead of playing Grand Thefto Auto IV in his room, he had to watch snooker on a black and white telly, and actually talk to his embarrassing parents, who were dressed like they were going to a bad fancy dress party and kept listening to Simon & Garfunkel. He was intrigued by the record player though: ‘You can touch it’, he marvelled, holding up a piece of vinyl, and poignantly struck by the intangible nature of the MP3 download.

Every day another year passed for the family, with new gadgets and gizmos delivered; teasmades, chest freezers (to store all those arctic rolls) and, by the end of the decade, Atari computers. Dad drove to work in a death-trap Ford Cortina with no wing mirrors, and mum spent her waking hours stirring a soup of soiled children’s clothing in something called a twin tub.

The point of all this was to make us appreciate the relentless march of technology over the last 30 years, and ponder upon how computers and mobiles have slowly changed the dynamics of family life. But really it was just another excuse for an ‘I Love the 1970s’ nostalgia fest and some questionable decorating decisions, including putting back a knocked-through partition wall (eat that Location, Location, Location). Still, it was all quite good fun, even if I did keep waiting for Sam Tyler to turn up.

In the next couple of weeks the family move on to the 80s and 90s, so watch out for brick phones, Sony Walkmans and the advent of something called the internet.

You never know, it might just catch on.

Cheryl Freedman