Victorian Misery Makes for Modern TV

The six members of the Bowler family were all smiles when they were picked to star in the British television show “The 1900 House.” For three months, the suburban middle-class family would give up its ordinary routine and live as Victorians, wearing corsets and knickers, eating porridge and stew, spending evenings in the parlor by gaslight. Joyce Bowler, the 44-year-old matriarch of the Bowler family, thought it would be a grand adventure, a cross between a Charles Dickens novel and “The Real World.”

“We all thought it would be a bit of fun--like a costume drama or a reenactment,” she says. “It didn’t turn out that way at all. We had no idea what this would do to us.”

The family figured it’d experience some separation anxiety as it lived without 20th century appliances such as the telephone, the computer, the television and the automobile. But shortly after arriving at their restored row house in the South of London, the Bowlers came face to face with more immediate discomforts.

Doing the laundry was a three-day ordeal that left Joyce’s skin blistered and peeling. Boiling a kettle of water on the coal-stoked range took nearly a half-hour. Nine-year-old Joe ached for peanut butter and chocolate spread. Seventeen-year-old Kathryn found she absolutely couldn’t abide by period shampoo--a mix of soap, fat, egg yolks and lemon juice. “I smell vomity!” she cried.

And surely they weren’t serious about those torn-up pieces of newspaper piled up in the outhouse where the toilet paper should have been? “I thought it would be the bigger things--like the lack of heating or the lack of electricity,” says Kathryn. “But it was the small things that did us in. I thought something like my hair would be totally trivial. I’d just comb it back, right? But I woke up in the morning feeling bad and then for the rest of the day, all I could think was, ‘God, I’m miserable.’ ”

Thankfully, the Bowlers’ misery made for great TV. First appearing in Britain last fall, “The 1900 House” was originally planned as a modest experiment to demonstrate advances in household technology. To the surprise of the producers, the show turned out to be more human drama than science experiment, beating out the stateside import “Friends” in its time slot and making national celebrities out of the Bowlers.

Producers at New York’s Channel 13 condensed the series to four parts, which begin airing on PBS on Monday.. The series is one of several new reality-based shows that focus on real people thrust into extraordinary circumstances. In addition to a rash of “Real World” knockoffs, audiences already have embraced “Survivor,” the new CBS series billed as a cross between “Gilligan’s Island” and “Lord of the Flies.” In it, 16 people are left on a tropical island, divided into two teams and asked to send someone home every three days by popular vote. The last one on the island gets $1 million.

With no big payout and a decidedly more mild-mannered approach, “The 1900 House” proves that the gimmickry and voyeurism of recent reality-based television can be put to a higher purpose.

“This brings raw history to life,” says Beth Hoppe, executive producer for Thirteen/WNET, the New York public television station that brought the series to America. “Most of us have a romantic, sepia-toned notion of what life must have been like a hundred years ago. Here we’re seeing people experiencing history in full color.”

Removal of All 20th Century Items

The project began with a top-to-bottom overhaul of an ordinary home a mile away from the Millennium Dome in Greenwich. The goal of the restoration, says the program’s cultural advisor Daru Rooke, was to “strip this house of all traces of the 20th century.” Construction crews tore out the plasterboard, insulation and heating equipment. A prop specialist provided period kitchen products, linens and furniture. A horticultural historian planted a period garden. The producers even hired “Britain’s No. 1 expert on the breeding of antique poultry” to provide authentic chickens for a backyard coop.

“Every detail was perfect, from the socially aspirant fake marble fireplace to the state-of-the-art gas lamps,” Rooke says. The producers took as much care selecting a family. More than 400 families applied, responding to a newspaper ad with a flood of videotaped statements. One young boy declared that he wanted “to see Mum work very hard.” Another applicant said he wanted to “ease down the tempo of life--to get conversation back as a feature of life.”

“We heard from a lot of Victorian buffs who have re-created period homes and live like that all the time,” Rooke says. “But those people are nutters. We wanted real people--and that’s why the Bowlers worked.”

In addition to living as Victorians, the family also agreed to submit to constant camera surveillance. Which meant smiling sheepishly while dumping chamber pots, shaving armpits or figuring out how to assemble Victorian “sanitary ware” 30 years before the invention of the tampon. Knowing that every last bit of personal business could be broadcast might have been just too much for some families, but the Bowlers insist that the around-the-clock presence of a three-member camera crew did not make a big difference in their day-to-day lives.

“We weren’t going to perform for anyone,” says Paul Bowler, 39, who works as a telecommunications specialist for the British Royal Marines. “We were in a time bubble of 1900 and the camera crew were in a time bubble of 1999 and we never met.” Paul admits that he probably had it easiest among the members of his family. Reporting to a London recruiting office each day--in full period uniform--Paul pitched in a bit with housework, but otherwise appears to have slipped quite comfortably into his role as “master of the house.”

“I had a very good time,” he says. “But it was difficult to see your family in pain and not be able to do anything about it.” The four children had a more difficult adjustment, forced to trade their computer games for pop guns and Spice Girls CDs for family sing-alongs. But at least they had a break--the kids were allowed to change into street clothes at a neighbor’s house to attend school each day. Not that it made much difference to Joe, who summed it up like this: “I thought it was boring.”

Time Travel Was Worst for Mum

It was the mother Joyce who had the hardest time. Wrapped tight in whalebone corsets and overwhelmed by an array of odd contraptions and endless lists of chores, Bowler gained a new appreciation for the distance women have come in the past century. “I’ve never been much of a feminist,” she says. “I’ve never been much of anything. I’ve just trotted around in my own world. But in the process of this I discovered that so very recently, the life of an ordinary woman was restricted in every way possible.”

Seeking relief, Joyce hired a maid to help with housework, bought herself a bicycle and searched out information about the then-radical women’s suffrage movement. Rooke says Joyce’s experience was typical of many Victorian women. “The artificial environment in our experiment drew out the same sense of boredom and rebellion that Victorian women suffered,” he says. But the project also introduced problems that real Victorians never would have stumbled upon. For one, the family had no training in the contraptions, ointments and implements that filled its house; it had to learn to use everything from scratch. For another, the family members got so sick of the probing stares and odd remarks when they ventured out in period costume that they became virtual shut-ins.

“If the project is replicated it must involve a whole community,” says Rooke. “This family was dumped in the situation without the support of neighbors, and they couldn’t interact with other people. The pressure on them was 20 times harder than it would have been for a family at the time. They were surrounded by teeming masses of people, amongst whom they were the weirdos.”

And sometimes, the pressure was just too much. One evening Joyce Bowler spent a few hours carefully following a convoluted recipe for compote of rhubarb. With the family gathered around the dinner table, forks in hand, she opened up the range oven and found she had just prepared a pan of slimy pink slop. Cameras followed her as she stumbled into the garden and burst into tears. “I’ve produced something I wouldn’t give a pig!” she screamed. That night, the family ate sausage. While it might have been out of character for the master of the house, Paul did the cooking. “I’m not stupid,” he says. “I had to go home to the 20th century at the end of all this.”

* Part 1 of “The 1900 House” can be seen at 9 p.m. Monday on KCET and KVCR. The remaining three parts air on consecutive Mondays at 9 p.m.