The Edwardians – The Birth Of Now
Food week
Edwardian Supersize Me (16 April, 9pm, 91Èȱ¬ Four)
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How would a modern-day couple about town fare on an Edwardian middle-class gourmet's diet?
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In Edwardian Supersize Me food critic and writer Giles Coren and comedian Sue Perkins gamely accept the challenge to live like an Edwardian gent and lady for one week, with traditional dress, parlour games, dinner parties and picnics all thrown in for good measure.
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Celebrity chef Sophie Grigson and her in-house kitchen team are in charge of making sure that Giles and Sue dine on the best the Edwardian era had to offer.
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Multiple-course breakfasts, lunches, teas and dinners, taken from Herman Senn's Century Cookbook – a typical menu for an upper middle-class family of the time – are dished up with vigour.
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Soon Giles and Sue's restrictive Edwardian dress and overall mental state is straining under the pressure of three full meals a day, rounded off with multiple course dinners and strict Edwardian evening etiquette.
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Their final challenge in their Edwardian eat-a-thon is a 12-course "recreation" banquet at The Savoy.
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The menu is based on one cooked at the hotel on 12 January 1905. With dishes such as truffles, oysters, stuffed chicken with foie gras and duck cooked and served in its own blood, followed by a host of sweet treats and champagne, will they survive unscathed?
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The Edwardian Larder (18 April, 9pm, 91Èȱ¬ Four)
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When Captain Scott set out to conquer the South Pole in 1910, he began a journey which was to end in death, and enduring fame. In the wake of the tragedy, we have not remembered him as a pioneer in another area: the development of sponsorship deals with food manufacturers of the day.
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The inside of Scott's hut, still intact at Cape Evans, Antarctica, is a potent reminder of the growing power of food brands in the Edwardian era. It is filled with packaged food, all provided free to the expedition in exchange for advertising rights and publicity photographs.
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In the first years of the 20th century, packaging was no longer merely a way of keeping food fresh and unadulterated. The brand came into its own, bringing with it unprecedented growth in manufactured foods and advertising.
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The Edwardian Larder explores the years when mass-produced foods came of age, through the stories of four famous food brands: Perrier water, Cadbury's Dairy Milk, Typhoo tea and Marmite. Along the way we encounter many other areas of the Edwardian diet – from meat extracts to breakfast cereals.
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Each brand has its surprises. The tea-tasters of Typhoo show us how its makers turned a waste product into a best-seller.
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Chef Matthew Kay tries out some recipes to show how Marmite found a niche market amongst vegetarians.
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Cadbury's Dairy Milk demonstrates how Britain got turned on to Milk Chocolate, and Vyvyan Harmsworth of the Daily Mail shows how his forebear created Perrier, a truly modern brand which was not quite as French as it seemed.
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From food scares and adulteration to celebrity endorsement and aspirational marketing, The Edwardian Larder explores some very modern preoccupations of the age.
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Edwardians In Colour – The Wonderful World
Of Albert Kahn: A Vision Of The World (starts 19 April, 9pm)
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In 1907, the Lumière Brothers unveiled their latest invention to the public. It was called the autochrome – the world's first practical system for taking true colour photographs.
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Flabbergasted by this amazing technological development, French financier Albert Kahn resolved to undertake what would become one of the most ambitious projects in the history of photography.
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For the next two decades, Khan spent much of his vast personal fortune on the creation of what he called "a photographic inventory of the planet as it is inhabited and managed by humanity at the beginning of the 20th century".
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This fascinating five-part series for 91Èȱ¬ Four charts his photographic journey across the continents.
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Thoroughly Modern (starts 18 April, 8.30pm)
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The must-haves of the Edwardian era are still with us today. The Victorians may be credited with dragging Britain from a rural society into an industrial age, but it was the enterprising Edwardians we have to thank for developing four objects of desire for the 20th century and beyond as this four-part series shows...
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The corset
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The corset has been cast through history as a sartorial baddie – an instrument of torture that moulded the Victorian hour-glass figure. But today the corset is back in a new guise, strutting its stuff at the forefront of fashion – an emblem of sexual power.
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So how did we get here? The origin of that huge shift lies with the new woman of the Edwardian era. They were leading more active, productive lives, so they needed clothes and underwear to help them take up their new freedoms.
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Oscar-winning costume designer John Bright investigates how the corset evolved.
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The snapshot camera
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In February 1900, Kodak launched a small, cheap, handheld camera onto the market – George Eastman's Box Brownie. It went on to revolutionise photography – putting beauty in the hands of the beholder when camera pioneer.
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More than 100,000 were sold within a year, over half of those in the UK. One of them was bought by Queen Alexandra, who went on to snap her family and aristocratic friends, creating beautiful photo-albums that are still in Windsor Castle.
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Sun photographer Arthur Edwards takes up a challenge to use the same early Box Brownie to snap the current Queen.
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The typewriter
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Who would have thought that the humble typewriter was so key to the events of the 20th century? There it was, behind the white blouse revolution, as the number of women in the office swelled from 2,000 in Victorian times to 166,000 in Edwardian times.
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There it was again, in Sylvia Pankhurst's parlour, typing out radical pamphlets for Edwardian Suffragettes.
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But there was a twist – the typewriter helped keep the more dextrous woman a secretary for the following 70 years – it's only since men have been able to use the word processor that women have left the typing pool.
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The typewriter as we know it was the result of a technological battle, like we have today between Apple and Microsoft.
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Early models were quite bizarre. Britain, Germany and America battled it out for supremacy, but eventually the QWERTY keyboard was pronounced winner.
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But its keys were not arranged logically to suit the fingers of the typist - quite the opposite in fact. The QWERTY keyboard we still use today was designed by an engineer to slow the typist down, so as not to jam the keys.
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The bicycle
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It's been hailed as one of the most important inventions of all time – it's been credited with extending the gene pool and affording the kind of social mobility and freedom that has had a huge impact on society.
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The safety bicycle was invented by the Victorians but the Edwardians turned it into a more universal mode of transport.
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It opened up a new world for the enterprising middle classes and innovations introduced during this time are still being used today.
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Ninety-five per cent of the bikes we ride today are produced outside the UK. But the programme visits Pashley in Stratford-Upon-Avon where they produce hand-made bikes for leisure and commercial use and still use the Sturmey Archer gear system invented in 1902.
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Today's cyclists are turning back to more traditional bicycle designs like those made at Pashley and they are the cycle of choice for the Royal Mail.
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Collector and restorer of Edwardian bikes Doug Pinkerton takes his prized collection to the Halesowen Cycle Club. Doug gives a master class to modern Lycra-wearing cyclists on how to ride Edwardian bikes. And they will attempt to ride them around the Velodrome.
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We also meet the Desford Lane Peddlars, a group of vintage cyclists from Leicestershire who are keeping the traditions of the Edwardian cyclist alive.
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Shopping For England (22 April, 9pm, 91Èȱ¬ Four)
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Shopping For England reveals how the stuffy department stores of the West End of London and the cramped and dingy shops of the British High Street were transformed by American shopping principles.
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On Oxford Street, Gordon Selfridge builds the biggest, most luxurious, purpose-built department store in Britain. Selfridge launches an unprecedented advertising campaign to persuade Edwardian women out of the suburbs and into the city to share a new safe social space and shopping experience.
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As a public supporter of the suffragette movement, Selfridge claims he is helping to emancipate women.
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In Liverpool, dime store king Frank Woolworth tests the market for a chain of stores where everyone can afford to shop. He achieves his low prices by buying in bulk, paying in cash and, most importantly, embracing the most modern manufacturing techniques.
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These enterpreneurs encouraged shoppers of all classes, enticing them in with attractive window displays and special exhibitions. Above all they turned shopping into a pleasurable experience which encouraged more people to part with their money. The modern consumer was born.
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