Turn Back Time - The Family - Episode 6

In the series finale, our families are experiencing the 1970’s.  For the parents, this trip back is nostalgia for them.  Traditional family roles were changing.  The family itself was fracturing during this decade as well.  So which was the best decade for the families?  There will be a poll taken at the end of the series.  They will experience the 1970’s at warp speed.
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The Taylor family will return to the working-class home.  Mr. Taylor’s father worked in construction.  The Taylors had come down in the world from their time in the Edwardian period and are now firmly in the working class.  The Taylors explore their new home.  The Meadows return to their middle-class home.  They started at the bottom and worked their way up.  It is a nostalgia trip for the parents and the girls, it is a trip into the unknown.  The girls are not impressed with the décor.

The Hawkes family move back into an apartment in the big house.  There were some improvements to the apartment.  Mrs. Hawkes is officially a landlady and reflects on what her parents had.

A new family joins the street and they are renting an apartment from the Hawkes family.  They are the Rhodes family, and this family has a single mom and two sons.  The tenants are not impressed with their surroundings.  Mrs. Hawkes is encouraging to the family because they had encountered worse conditions.  How will the Rhodes handle life in the 1970s?  Ms. Rhodes starts knuckling down to clean things up.

The men in the family are enjoying their childhoods.  The kids are having a good laugh at them.  Children had toys in the 1970s and everyone had toys.  The Rhodes boys are unimpressed with the low technology amusements.

Everyone settles down for the night.  Ms. Rhodes is finding cooking convenience food a challenge.  She only has a hot plate for her stove.  Mr. Meadows is enjoying the music and singing along.  Mrs. Meadows is preparing dinner for the family.  She is unsure of what she is going to be feeding her family.  The pancakes are overcooked.  It is the first time that the family is sitting in front of the TV.

The children head off to school and everyone goes to school.  The school leaving age was raised to sixteen.  The oldest Meadows girl works as a teaching assistant.  All the women of the neighborhood will be working.  Ms. Rhodes will be working in a café.  Mrs. Taylor will be working as a district nurse and Mrs. Meadows will be working as a crossing guard.  Mr. Taylor will be working on a construction project.  Mr. Meadows is left behind, the three-day working week was introduced during this decade.  He should be working as a draftsman as his father did, but he is being forced to stay home.  Mr. Meadows does the household chores.

Mr. Meadows reflects on his experiences as a child with one of the guides.  His father had worked less but was this part of the three-day week?  The guide said that everyone was subject to the three-day work week because it prevented coal from running out.  Mrs. Taylor arrives home to discover that her husband is on strike.  So how do the other families cope with the conditions of the 1970s?  Watch this episode to find out.

This episode is a fascinating look at what happened in England during the 1970s and how Margaret Thatcher got elected.  This would be a good episode for research purposes in a history class and independent study students as well as a family and consumer education class.