Alien life form
So my latest guilty pleasure is this charming show on PBS imported from Britain called Manor House. It's billed as "Upstairs, Dowstairs" meets Reality TV, and the comparison is quite fair.
The premise is basically a three month project recreating life in an Edwardian-era manor home, circa 1906 -- what we've seen in the seemingly innumerable Merchant Ivory films of the past two decades -- taking a close look at how both the aristocracy and the staff behave when put in their requisite roles.
They've done this same style of project with World War II homes, prehistoric British stone-age dwellings, and frontier homes, so I guess it was inevitable they'd eventually cover Edwardian times too.
The Edwardian gentry has been a source of seemingly endless fascination in fiction over the years, and there are obvious reasons why: It's such an alien lifestyle to our modern ways.
One of the big problems for the television project has been retaining scullery maids, because it's such loathsome work -- 16 hours a day in the kitchen, preparing foods, cleaning pots and pans, mopping floors and other drudge work. It drove two participants out in a matter of days.
There's also been an endless stream of bitching and moaning from the downstairs staff -- the lower servants -- about the length of their days and the harshness of their masters. The upstairs staff and the house's family themselves haven't had the same complaints, but they've had the same sense of unreality that everyone in the project shares.
The show's narrator -- and several of the more self-aware participants -- have noted that they've raised objections that never would have occurred to them one hundred years ago. I guess it speaks to how far English society has come in 100 years that modern people in their late teens and early 20s feel so restricted by this type of life.
Then again, as someone who regularly works 16 hours a day, I'd also like to invite them to quit whining and just get on with it.