The Future Back in Time for the Weekend

Meet the Ashby-Hawkins family.

For one summer, they gave up the trappings of their modern lives

and travelled back in time to live through 50 years

of British weekends.

Steph, Rob, Daisy and Seth

have experienced a radical transformation

-in how we spend our leisure time...

-I'm free!

-..from the formal...

-Feel like I'm going to a wedding.

-..to the frivolous...

-We're going on holiday!

..from do-it-yourself to doing almost nothing.

You've turned into Wham!

-Starting in 1950...

-Oh, my...

..their own home was their time machine...

-It's 1961!

-..fast-forwarding them through a new year each day...

-What on earth are you doing?

-We're making a massive dartboard.

-It's beige!

-Oh, there's a telly up in the corner as well, look.

-..as they discovered how a social, technological...

-What's that?

-..and spending revolution...

-Oh, my God!

..transformed our free time for ever.

-Are you ready?

-Yeah!

-Now, at the end of their time travels...

You spent seven hours and 15 minutes on your phone last Sunday.

Let the robots do the work!

..I'll be exploring what their leisure time might look like

in the future.

The rate of change has been phenomenal

since we left the Ashby-Hawkins in 1999.

Our lives and homes are now full of technology that would be

unrecognisable to a family in the 1990s, let alone the 1950s.

So now, I want to have a look at how the changes we've been

through already give us

a hint about what our spare time might look like in the future.

If I'm honest, I don't think any of us

really knew what we were letting ourselves in for.

It was just an incredible way of really getting to understand history

and it's been a much more powerful experience than I expected it to be.

-Oh!

-Oh!

-Power cut!

To see the eras go by was a real eye-opener as to how

lucky we are now in contemporary life and how much variety we have.

The one thing I hope for in the future would be

not for technologies to sort of take over everything as it

sort of feels like it is in modern-day life.

To be honest, I actually have no idea what the future has got

to bring for us, and it's quite exciting not knowing.

The family have experienced first-hand the dramatic changes

to the way we spend our leisure time.

Oh, my God!

-This looks so gross!

-Wow.

As they travelled back through history, everything

the Ashby-Hawkins did was guided by a remarkable government survey.

Oh, look, it's doing it! Yes!

The Family Expenditure Survey started in the 1950s,

recording what ordinary British families

spent their money on right up until 2000, giving us the best

possible clues to what people were doing with their leisure time.

Looking down here, it's VCR, videos, home computer.

In the '50s, it was a shilling on fags.

This man owns five televisions!

Over 10,000 families took part every year,

recording their spending on everything from a washing machine

to a games console, revealing the new trends

-and technologies that emerged with every decade.

-That's so cool!

That's really good!

The Family Expenditure Survey ended in 2000 but,

thanks to the latest government research,

we can discover how families are now spending their money

and what that says about our leisure time.

'I'm back with social historian Polly Russell,

'to see how the Ashby-Hawkins' modern home reflects how we all

'spend our free time today.'

-Ah, here we are, in the living room.

-It's the 21st century.

It's hard to imagine that this was the room that the piano was in.

Yeah.

And then we took out the piano at the beginning of the '60s

-and smashed it up to make room for this.

-Yeah.

And from today's perspective, it looks unremarkable, doesn't it?

But actually, if you go back in time, so much of what's here

is really quite new and would have just been unheard of.

And indicates such a different sort of a life and a family dynamic then

than Rob's chair, where he smoked his pipe and read the newspaper.

And if you look over here, you know, you've got, yes,

the television's been around since the 1960s but, you know,

the tablets, the smartphone, digital cameras - I mean,

that's relatively new, isn't it?

And we expect technology to keep delivering things.

We want people to entertain us and we're bored with that and give us that and give us more,

and we want technology to reduce the amount of time

we have to work and increase the amount of time that we have

to play and give us things to play with.

It could carry on indefinitely.

You couldn't have imagined, even in 1999,

-where it was going to be now, 17 years later.

-Absolutely.

More recent expenditure surveys show us

that household spending has doubled in the UK within the last 60 years.

And when you look just at the category of leisure

and entertainment, that has increased, decade by decade,

year-on-year, and continues to do so.

People have more money than they did,

spend more money than they did, and it's constantly going up.

That's right, but then they're spending more money on leisure

and entertainment. We're prepared to pay for it.

It's as important to us as housing and as food.

So if the future follows the pattern of the past,

it's going to keep on going like that -

people are going to carry on spending more money,

-and they're going to want to spend it on leisure things. So what is it going to be on?

-Just don't know.

I mean, it's those things that, you know, perhaps now seem to be

slightly strange, on the edge, early adopters are doing.

A few of those, presumably, will become completely normal.

So like it was with TV and it was with phones and it was with

foreign holidays - Rob and Steph there having a lovely time abroad.

Foreign beach would have been quite a rare thing,

and now, it's just an everyday thing.

I racked my brain. I think, maybe space travel?

Today, technology fills up our free time, but in the '50s, technology

was about to create free time by liberating us from housework.

At the start of the experiment,

the Ashby-Hawkins' home was a place of work, not play,

and most of the responsibilities fell on Steph as the housewife...

Oh, my God! It's revolting!

..a complete role reversal from her life today as the family's

main breadwinner.

In the '50s, I didn't really have any free time.

The amount of housework that we were expected to do

was absolutely ridiculous.

My mum and I have no downtime whatsoever

and we spend our entire time looking after other people.

Domestic work ate up nearly all of Steph's time.

On average, a '50s housewife did a staggering 75 hours a week.

It would be interesting to see, actually,

how dry the stuff comes out the other end.

And the answer is, actually, not very much difference at all.

It's still really wet. But I've just seen something.

I think I'm doing it the wrong way round. Look at that!

That's the way you mangle!

Yes!

This doesn't feel like it would be any different than it would have

been 100 years, 200, 300 years before.

It feels like I'm just waiting for the explosion of technology

to happen that's going to really free me.

-By Jove, the tech is going to free me!

-And it did, to a certain extent.

-Looks nice, doesn't it?

-The hot water.

As washing machines came into the reach of ordinary families,

these laboursaving devices created leisure time that simply

-hadn't existed before.

-Look how filthy the water is.

1950s woman would have thought it was a miracle.

We're not there yet but it's a symbol of hope.

It's a beacon in the corner of the kitchen.

The washing machine was followed

by other laboursaving devices and products.

It's not just a Hoover. There's a floor polisher.

My domestic cup runneth over.

I absolutely have a renewed respect

for the housewife of the '50s and '60s.

Lift your feet up! Lift your feet up!

Hats off to them for keeping houses clean,

keeping children washed, fed and cleaned

with very little money and with very few resources.

Despite all the technological advances,

for Steph, the home remained a place of work for decades.

Oh, kids!

Have you seen this lounge?!

# Do the Shake n' Vac and put the freshness back

# Do the Shake n' Vac and put the freshness back... #

I think I might open a window.

Men gradually took on a slither of the workload.

But housework didn't go away.

There is, however, a new generation of laboursaving technology

which promises to create precious leisure time for all of us.

Polly is bringing the family the very latest cleaning robots

designed to take housework off our hands completely.

I've come today and I've brought you some presents

which may be the answer to the end of cleaning for the future.

-Wow.

-Automated cleaning products.

-Awesome.

Since you've been involved in this experiment,

the amount of time that you've spent cleaning

-has really changed, hasn't it?

-Yep.

In the '50s, I just spent my entire life cleaning.

That's all I did.

I thought I'd miss my tablet

and just kind of like the leisure type of tech.

I hadn't taken into account all of the white goods

that I just completely take for granted.

And now how many hours on average

do you think that you clean over a week?

It's probably about ten.

So significantly less than Steph was doing in the early '50s.

In the '50s, there were lots of repetitive tasks

that we thought were entirely unnecessary, like dusting every day.

With something like this, if you've got a lot of traffic

coming in the house and you've got a little robot thing

that goes round and cleans it,

why wouldn't you just have it there running?

-Do you want to give them a go?

-Hell, yeah.

-Absolutely.

Keen to try out the family's first robot,

Rob takes it outside to tackle the lawn...

How do you turn it on?

..something that took him hours to perfect in the '60s.

Ooh, it purrs like a kitten.

And over.

Right, it's on.

Is that on?

Here we go.

I'm standing back.

Oh, it's clever.

The sensors work.

There.

There.

It's not voice-activated, is it?

See, now it's doing the edges, look.

That is a straight line, isn't it?

I loved mowing my lawn in the '60s because it was a big machine,

it smelled of oil but this is incredibly convenient.

I could be sitting on my lounge chair just clicking

and I wouldn't be out here. I'd be...

I could just go out and the lawn would be all done for me.

It seems to be sort of mowing.

What do you think? What do you think?

Hour and a half I was out here doing it.

Actually, the '60s lawnmower was great

because, even though it took a human being to run it,

I loved that sense of satisfaction.

Oh, it's gone back home.

That's very clever.

I don't believe that this is the future of mowing the lawn, no.

This is...

No.

Inside the house, Daisy and Seth

are taking an unusual interest in housework.

Is this like a record player? Because it feels like one.

Oh, I pressed something.

'Error one.

'Move Roomba to a new location.

'Then press clean to restart.'

Let the robots do the work.

Not me!

Wait, can you control where it goes?

It automatically calculates the room's size

and adjusts its cleaning time appropriately.

-Does it hover so it can go up the stairs?

-No.

That's a bit too futuristic.

OK, look at those crumbs there

and let's if they get rid of those crumbs.

This is actually quite cool.

-It doesn't have any consideration for human beings.

-No!

The carpet is actually clean.

It actually does its job but very, very slowly.

Dock it. Dock it.

It's very futuristic, I think.

I vacuumed the carpet with a non-electric vacuum in the '50s

where I was literally like rolling something on the carpet,

this is literally so much better than doing that.

It's doing it for you

and I would've killed to have one of those in the '50s.

Having cleaned her way through five decades of history,

Steph's glad to get her hands on her own laboursaving robot.

It's stuck to the table.

"Put robot onto glass."

Oh, look at it go!

It kind of looks like a hairy slug going up the window.

But it's got sensors where it finds the edge.

It knows where the edge is.

I'll be able to see whether it's actually cleaning.

Looks like it's just smearing everything round at the moment.

Although it's a lot better than the 1960s floor polisher.

A lot better.

I would imagine, in the '60s and '70s,

they would've thought this was like super awesome.

It's the future.

And it's here now and I'm a bit cynical.

So what is the verdict of cleaning robotic-style?

Doesn't feel human.

It feels like you're taking away an aspect of your life.

So you feel you would miss something

if robots were to replace all the cleaning?

You don't do any of the cleaning in the house

so why would it make a difference to you?

When you got given a washing machine in the 1950s,

you were really excited.

It felt revolutionary.

Could you imagine feeling the same

about any of the gadgets that you've tried today?

No.

There's too many stages for tiny little jobs.

Do you see a future in which lawns will be mowed automatically,

floors will be cleaned automatically?

These will not be things that we do?

-I think in our lifetime it will be. Probably not theirs.

-I think so.

Oi!

The idea of robots doing the dirty work was unimaginable

in the Ashby-Hawkins' basic 1950s house.

It reflected the post-war shortage of cash and goods,

leaving the family with little else to do but make do and mend.

Going the right way? I'm going the right way now. There we go.

Normally, I'm not very good at DIY but I think I pulled it off.

Is it that way?

That's the way.

The family found out that DIY evolved over the decades.

In the '50s, you couldn't just buy cheap ready-made

and, with virtually full employment,

there weren't many handymen around looking for odd jobs,

so doing it yourself became a necessity.

Rob spent all afternoon working out how to make a new doorbell.

I'm going to attach...

That's the terminal.

It looks nothing like that on the terminal.

Start from the beginning, shall we? That's always handy, isn't it?

How's it going, son? Let's try it down here.

BELL RINGS

-Oh!

-Fire up the button.

It's alive!

What started out as need became a national pastime,

as '60s dads got the bug for modernisation...

That's fabulous.

There's covering the door and boxing in a fireplace.

..with the added bonus of allowing fathers

to spend lots of their free time with their sons,

passing on valuable skills.

-Are you going to help me with it?

-Yeah, OK. Why not?

Sure, someone to blame in case it goes wrong.

Wallpaper first, I think. What do you think? Wallpaper first?

I think the DIY was good because it's been a while

since I've actually had quality, like, father-son time with my dad.

Stand back.

-That looks...

-Yeah, it's actually not that bad.

But I think he's only good at it when I'm there.

He's not the best at DIY.

-Huh?

-Aw, yeah!

The really important thing with stencils

is that you don't put too much paint on

because it just splurges.

By the '80s, with the number of homeowners rocketing,

DIY meant spending your weekend giving your home the right look.

No, no, no, no!

We've got to live in here.

It was no longer just a job for the boys.

I have to say, like it or loathe it,

we've certainly transformed the room.

And showiness was the key.

-Whoa!

-Huh?

I was looking outside in our road, no-one's got it.

Yeah, wonder why(!)

In the '90s, simply redecorating was no longer enough.

Two, three, open your eyes.

Ah!

Lifestyle shows taught us

that our homes were now in need of a complete makeover.

Oh, my God! Hello!

We've got the shirts.

Rob, do you fancy red? Daisy.

And you can be in the orange team.

So we began throwing out anything that didn't fit

every time we fancied a revamp.

They're keeping their eyes shut! Oh!

Oh!

-Oh!

-Wow!

We still love to furnish our homes in the latest styles and fashions,

but what with cheap, off-the-shelf solutions and a reliance on handymen

these days, we rarely spend our spare time doing it ourselves

and the old skills are disappearing.

Half of under-35s now can't put up a shelf or even wire a plug.

Well, here we are in a marvellous, big DIY store.

It's just round the corner from you. Are you a regular?

I didn't even know it existed until today.

-You've never been in here?

-No!

Do you have an idea what is in this shop?

-It's all very foreign to me, the whole thing.

-I feel the same.

You go up to one of these blokes, "I need to stick some things together,"

and they go, "How big is it?" "Oh..."

No, it's a horrible feeling.

During the experiment, did you get a sense of what it was like

to be a dad in the past, the kind of man who could do stuff?

Yeah, absolutely. I felt that I had to repair anything that broke

throughout the whole thing which was great.

There was a satisfaction

about building and repairing stuff yourself

and I really like that idea.

-It's dying out, isn't it?

-I think so.

For me, certainly, because throw-away culture is so rife

and it's easier to buy something instead of replacing it.

It's easier to buy something instead of making it.

That's a real shame.

So, if you can't do any DIY, what do you do

when something falls down in the house?

Usually, I let these things accumulate over time

so there's six or seven things to do

and I'll just call a handyman and get him out and do it.

You live in a wreckage of a house with bits falling off the walls

and windows that won't shut until it's enough for a guy to...

Justify calling someone.

Now that we no longer spend our leisure time tinkering

and fixing things in our sheds,

we've gone from a nation of makers to a nation of consumers.

But there's one group of people trying to change all that.

Rob and Seth are going to get a taste of the maker movement.

In contrast to our fast-paced lives,

there's a renewed interest in crafts and pastimes that take time.

As making things by hand undergoes a resurgence,

maybe our future leisure time

will once more involve a toolbox and a DIY manual.

-Morning.

-Morning.

-How you doing? You all right? Welcome to Maker-versity.

-We're sort of part of the maker movement.

-Excellent.

So the future of DIY, in my opinion,

is going to be a combination of older traditional methods

where we weren't wasting as much materials,

combined with modern techniques.

The fact is, we could still have a small corner of our house

that we could dedicate to making.

As landfill space runs out,

we're likely to face tougher restrictions

on what we can throw away.

In the future, we might all need to rediscover the skills

to recycle, repair and make things.

We do quite a lot of 3-D printing here so we can print off parts

and use off-the-shelf materials to actually make furniture

or anything we could use in the house.

-Instead of buying these parts...

-You make it.

-You make it, yes.

So maybe in the future these will be on your desktop,

sitting next to your computer.

-Right, let's get started.

-Yeah.

Rob and Seth are making a 21st-century workbench

with sustainable wood and 3-D-printed joints...

-Wow.

-That is so cool.

..so that DIY will have a permanent place in the family's future.

-This is going to take probably about six hours.

-Six hours!

So I made a couple here for you.

OK, so we're going to simply cut this down using a saw.

Here we go.

We need two lots of that. 118.

-Don't take your eye off it.

-I'm not.

Argh!

Look, look at your messy edge, yeah? Yeah?

Look at mine, look.

Wait, one backboard clip?

-You've made two.

-We need two.

1188.

Width. It's one of those.

We've done two.

That's what I said earlier!

This is going to be our desktop so here we have the CNC router.

You can create a code that tells this where to go

and then we can actually etch in your name or something

to customise it in different ways.

-In the bottom right corner, maybe?

-Bottom right.

So, let's take all the components

and we'll make ourselves a nice, little workbench.

They should be nice and snug.

I didn't think we'd be able to make the table.

I thought maybe we'd mess up halfway through

and we'd have half a table.

Pop the top on.

Pop this backboard in place.

And it's a nice sturdy workstation.

Pretty good!

I've got a sense of achievement that we've actually done it.

Yeah, I made this. I didn't buy it, I made it.

I'd like to think we'll go back to the state of buy once, buy well

and, if it does break, we can repair it ourselves.

You're fixing it and it's yours and you should be proud of it.

Just need to make a chair now.

In the early part of the experiment, the family were kept so busy at home

that the idea of a leisure activity

was almost too exhausting to contemplate.

In the '50s, I sat on the sofa and I was asleep in about three minutes

as I was on my feet probably 10, 12 hours a day.

Nonstop walking up and down

and doing things all the time

and, if anyone had said to me,

"Do you fancy going to an aerobics class?"

I probably would have lumped them one, actually,

because I was too tired.

Seth, sit back.

As laboursaving devices increased the family's leisure time,

they were able to spend that time relaxing together

in front of their favourite acquisition...

Keep watching, you'll see what happens.

Look at that!

..the television.

It's coloured! That looks really cool!

By the '80s, it was high time for Steph and Rob to try out

the latest fitness fads

aimed at Britain's growing number of couch potatoes.

The body beautiful stuff started coming in in the '80s

when I had more leisure time.

Temptation is just to sort of sit there and eat biscuits

and watch the telly, really,

so the need for a forced form of exercise

did come about and it was fun. I mean, it was fun.

Doing all the different sorts of exercise was hilarious.

I thought it was a warm-up.

Holy Moses!

Fitness then became a whole new leisure industry

as we spent more of our time and money on gym membership

and the very latest equipment.

Five, six, seven, eight. Go.

Oh, wrong leg. Sorry!

Left leg.

Left leg.

Right leg.

Now you should feel it working the chest area.

This won't give you more, but it may help you to hold on

to what you've got, which is not very much!

Let's go. Four more.

Looking back on exercise from the experiment,

it's a series of fads

and crazes, essentially.

Quicker!

Since we left the Ashby-Hawkins in the '90s,

the UK fitness industry has grown five times bigger

and is now worth a staggering £4.3 billion.

Gyms are open round-the-clock and they're full of technology

telling you everything from your heart rate

to how many calories you've burnt to your percentage of body fat.

We've become a nation obsessed with how fit we are.

But, as gyms harness new technology to entertain us while we work out,

the future of one of our favourite leisure activities

may be exercise that transports us to another dimension.

OK, so find your speed.

Let's get going.

It's called immersive fitness and it's not for the faint-hearted.

-Ready?

-No.

Everybody up.

An import from New Zealand,

immersive fitness pushes you to the limit

as you cycle into a virtual world.

Get ready. Sit.

Off you go.

THEY WHOOP

It's fast, furious

and completely absorbing.

It was the best thing ever.

I actually felt like I was riding

along the road, up hills, down hills.

It felt like virtual reality.

I was going to the left, I was going to the right. It was like gaming.

It was just like that. Yeah. Better, in fact.

The technology they use today made me work probably ten times harder

than I would normally. I mean, I really did work harder.

Absolutely brilliant. I'm sold. I'm going to get one for the lounge.

It makes me travel sick.

I don't like it.

Makes me want to vomit.

I personally didn't like the screens because I get motion sickness

and it made me think I was going to be sick, actually.

And I have to say part of me was thinking,

"Well, where's the fresh air and where are the deer

"and where are the trees?"

But it is good in that now I do have a choice

that I can come and do this stuff and it's something for me,

because, as a '50s woman, I'd probably look at this and go,

"Why are you doing that, then?

"What's all that about?"

Rob and Steph weren't the only ones kept active during the experiment.

For 12-year-old Seth, the past was a total contrast to his modern life.

Just like 75% of British children, Seth has his own computer

and he spends his spare time on it in his bedroom,

gaming online with his friends...

I'm building a prison.

Hopefully a successful one.

..something that would have baffled a child in the 1950s.

I'm like the best on that server.

The experiment took him from outdoor freedom to ultimate gadget kid

in just five short weeks,

making him realise just what he'd been missing out on.

I spent most of my free time before the experiment playing video games

or on my phone or watching television,

but now I've realised that going outside is actually fun.

From camping in the woods...

It's not the best hammer!

..to playing out and scrambling around adventure playgrounds...

Whoa!

..Seth's time-travelling gave him a taste of the independence

and fresh air taken for granted by previous generations.

Learning skills and taking risks

that kids are protected from today...

We have fire.

..Seth's time was freer than any other family member.

It felt nice to have no supervision.

Anything could have happened and no-one was there to stop it.

It's a lot more fun than being at the park with my parents.

It just felt a lot more dangerous

and I think that's why it felt a lot more fun.

By the '80s, Seth was a latchkey kid.

He still had his freedom

but now he was surrounded by incredible new technology.

No wonder he spent a lot of his time indoors,

his eyes glued to the screen.

Are you sure you don't want to come outside

-and actually enjoy the sunshine?

-No. I've got to do this.

So, when more gadgets and gizmos

came through the front door in the '90s...

Oh, yes! It's a Game Boy!

Seth, like the majority of children,

had all the entertainment he needed in the comfort of his own home.

Nearer the end, I spent a lot more time on my own.

All my time was spent inside on the Nintendo or the Sega

or on the Game Boy,

like a captive of all this technology.

With more cars on the road than ever before

and saturation media-coverage of some high-profile crimes...

For goodness' sake, keep tight hold of your children.

..the outside world began to feel like an increasingly dangerous

place to many parents.

The outside world is big and scary,

particularly in the '90s, it becomes a bit scary and I would never have

dreamt of letting you out at the age of 10 or 11 onto the streets.

The appeal of technology is now greater than ever

and children today have lives that would have been unfathomable

to those of previous generations.

Today, two-thirds of children have never been to

a park by themselves and a third of children aged eight to ten have

never played outside on their own.

But things may be changing and technology is playing a part.

These are mini drones they look awesome.

Gadgets are now being developed

and sold that might coax youngsters away from their indoor screens.

-Are you ready?

-To spend more of their free time outdoors again.

Wow!

There we go.

-Oi! Wow!

-This is so complicated.

-It's going to kill me.

It's not, it's not, Harvey.

If the best technology no longer needs to be plugged in at home...

that means Seth and his friends are free to play their computer

games...outside.

I've got control of it but it's going the wrong way!

I have never used or played with a drone before.

It's really enjoyable because you get to control a robot.

Do a backflip.

There we go. I think I've mastered it, mostly.

Mostly. And Harvey is sort of trying to master it.

No! It's in the tree!

It's up there.

It feels weird because technology normally makes you inside, very,

like...closed off from the world but this technology allows you to

go outside and be with friends.

In the future, I would definitely want to play a lot more games like this.

And with technology reinventing two-wheeled fun as well...

maybe in the future, children will be tempted to spend

more of their time playing out.

-I'm rotating, I'm on, I'm on... I'm off again.

-Wow!

Yes! No!

Come on. OK. OK. I'm on it, I'm good, I'm good, I'm good.

-Right, now, try and move forward.

-Away!

-No, stop.

Harvey, if you put your foot right up against the plastic

the motor doesn't turn on, then you can just step on.

I really, actually want one of these, they're really, really cool.

Hold on.

Are you on?

Oh, my God!

Right, and then lean forward and it goes.

I can do it. I'm coming for you.

OK. Wow!

Being out and about with Harvey, it feels really fun.

Freedom!

When I was first told I was going outdoors I was like, oh, God,

this is going to be really boring.

Oh, no! Wow! Not too much freedom.

But then we got these and I was like, yeah, and the drones,

I was really happy.

If I had the choice between computer games and this I would just...

straight this.

Right, let's go.

The lure of technology and spending life in front of a screen

are things that 16-year-old Daisy knows a lot about.

I thought I was actually going to cry.

Um...before the experiment, without technology,

on my phone, I'm usually snapchatting, instagramming, twittering,

messaging my friends,

like, doing as much as I can in such a short space of time.

Technology has transformed teenage leisure time beyond recognition.

Gone are the days of having to be with your friends to socialise.

Now you can communicate with the touch of a button.

I still... I do spend a lot of my time on Snapchat, like,

seeing what everyone's doing at the weekend.

I actually am used to being in contact with pretty much everyone all at once.

Daisy is one of the 90% of all teenagers who have a mobile phone

and check it on average 150 times a day.

A far cry from life in the 1950s, when socialising had

to be done face-to-face rather than via Facebook.

In the '50s everything is formal and, you know, I have to go to

a dance to meet a husband to get married and to be like my mum.

-It's quite annoying.

-Yeah.

SHE SQUEALS

Daisy still had to leave the house to talk to a friend in the '60s,

as the Ashby-Hawkins, like the majority of Brits, didn't

have their own telephone.

But you had to use your time wisely.

Call charges weren't cheap.

A telephone call at that time cost sixpence.

-It's worth about 50p now.

-Really?

-Yeah, you got a minute for that.

-So...

-I spend, like, an hour on the phone.

So that would be...ten minutes is £5, so an hour would be £30.

-Have you got £30 worth of stuff to say to your friends?

-Nope.

The experiment was a revelation for Daisy.

# Everybody dance... #

This is so much fun.

Instead of missing her smartphone, she loved her teenage

life in the past, living in the moment with her friends around her.

This is what it's like to be a proper teenager.

Going out to raves, being rebellious and being cool.

We are not cool in any way. We just sit on our phones all day.

Why don't we just do this? I really wish we did this in our modern day.

I've got a mobile.

Then telephone technology changed again, with the truly portable

personal mobile phone.

Something teenagers quickly took to their hearts.

You're meant to have games on it.

By 1999, the bestselling Nokia 3210 ushered in teenage mobile culture

with its fast predictive texting becoming the new way to chat.

But few predicted the developments in technology that

transformed our phones into what they are today.

And gave teenagers a whole new way to spend their free time.

It surprised me how I was actually able to cope without technology.

In the '90s, when we were having the rave in my lounge, I felt

so much freer because I didn't have my phone on me snapchatting

every single second of the party.

I actually felt like it was a proper fun thing to do

and I actually felt normal.

Today, we're a nation of smartphone addicts and it's not just

teenagers who are glued to them, 76% of adults have a smartphone, too.

I think the thing that is so compulsive about them is the illusion they give us

of having remote control over every aspect of our lives.

It's no wonder we can't take our eyes off them.

They might be smart,

but for many young people they are no longer really phones.

They're mainly used for messaging, e-mailing and taking lots

and lots of photographs.

I'm bringing Daisy a brand-new bit of technology that will do all the

photography for her, without getting in the way of her enjoying her life.

-So, Daisy, you love your phone, don't you?

-Yeah, I do.

Do you have any notion of how many hours a day you spend on your phone?

-No, I've no idea.

-Do you want to know?

No, because I'm scared it's going to be quite embarrassing.

Because we have, in fact, installed an app here which will tell us

-how much you've used it in the last week.

-Oh.

Oh, you've only spent an hour and four minutes on your phone today.

Oh, wow, that's quite good.

But it's 10 o'clock on a Sunday morning,

I mean, what have you done for an hour and four minutes so far?

Seven hours and 15 minutes last Sunday.

You picked it up 54 times.

How on earth did you possibly find the time?

-What about the taking of selfies?

-I don't take selfies.

-You don't take selfies?

-Definitely don't.

-There's Instagram.

-With you in front of...

-These aren't selfies.

-You're in all of them.

-Yeah, but they...

-Facing the camera. What is a selfie?

Selfie's when you take a photo of yourself.

So, you didn't take a photo of yourself in that photo?

I did, but the ones upwards, I didn't.

I mean, in what world is that not a selfie?

To what extent do you find that your phone gets in the way of your interaction with your friends?

It's such a barrier because I'm just taking photos

and we're all laughing about the photos and then we're just trying to get the funny moments of us

all together, but actually, you should be there and enjoying the

moment rather enjoying it through your screen and then enjoying it later.

So, supposing there were a piece of technology which could free

you having to use your phone to take pictures?

It would be really nice and liberating.

This piece of technology, it's a camera that you wear

and it just takes photos. So, the downside is that you're not

in them but all your friends are and you don't have to stop and do it.

That's exciting.

So, you can go out for the day, for the evening,

not be holding up your phone all the time

and still have a photographic record of the day.

-Well, there you go.

-OK. Does it go with my outfit?

-It actually does go with that outfit. Is that what you're planning to wear?

-Yeah, yeah.

-I'm planning to wear this.

-Well, have fun.

-Thank you.

# Let's go, focus... #

To really get a sense of how new technology might free up

their lives in the future, all of Daisy's friends have

agreed to leave their smartphones at home for the day.

Oh, Daisy, try these on.

I'd completely forgotten that this camera is on me.

I'm quite a control freak so I like to just,

like, make everyone stand where they should and then take the photo

but I like the spontaneity of this.

-Guys, I think you'll like the chocolate.

-I'm liking that.

Chocolate all the way. OK, I'm going to... Oh, look in the middle.

I'm really bad at this game.

It is a bit odd because it takes a picture of every single thing I do.

Right now, if we all had our phones, we'd probably all be snapchatting

what we'd be doing. And that's not true socialising.

This is true socialising.

My phone would be a constant thing on my mind

and now I don't have it on my mind at all.

If the future sees more unobtrusive technology like this,

we might finally find the balance between spending

time in the moment and life looked at through a screen.

There certainly weren't any screens getting in the way

when the family started the experiment.

In the '50s, there wasn't a massive amount.

We had a pack of cards.

We had a partially working radio and I had some knitting.

That was pretty much it, I think. Oh, yeah, the piano.

And it was all stuff that's not laid on a plate for you.

It's stuff that you have to interact with and create yourself.

The family expenditure survey showed that as wages rose, '60s Brits

could spend more money on things to enjoy in their leisure time.

As a result, the family's house started to get a bit fuller.

Oh, yeah.

-That's huge! We've got a TV now.

-Amazing.

The family embraced the latest modern technology but some

-forms of entertainment didn't survive.

-Do it.

-This feels wrong.

Oh, that's just wrong, you shouldn't have done it.

-That's bang out of order, that is.

-My work here is done.

-In the '70s...

-I'm home!

..with pay kept high by unions and banking laws relaxed,

the introduction of new credit cards meant

we could spend even more money on more stuff to divert ourselves with.

Oh, no!

There was so much stuff in the '80s household.

-This room feels smaller.

-What a lot of furniture.

Our credit card habit, combined with advertising that encouraged us

to buy even more...

TAPE SLAMS OPEN

-There we go.

-That's the eject button!

..meant that the '80s house screamed out the desire to have it all.

I mean, look at that, you've got a pretending-to-be-Ming vase.

In a stately home, you could have a vase of that size,

but in a lounge? In suburbia?

What's all that about?

More stuff!

Kids!

By the '90s, home technology was filling up our leisure time

AND our homes

and the family enjoyed new computers...

One...two...

..multiple televisions...

Oh, there's a telly up in the corner as well, look.

..CD players and, of course, games consoles...

# Sonic the hedgehog. #

..and many of us were spending like there was no tomorrow...

# I dream I'm your one and only... #

Technology was evolving so quickly

and prices were going down so fast

the family got a real taste of the consequences

of our desire to always have the very latest thing.

We only got that a couple of years ago!

Because it was speeded up, it's like watching something on time-lapse.

Getting the new shiny thing out of a box

to literally, a handful of days later,

it being obsolete in the shed.

In the end, the Ashby-Hawkins found, like many Brits before them,

that their stuff had outgrown their house.

Their '50s home might have been sparse,

but at least there was more space.

Come the '90s, it was just wave after wave after wave

of things coming into the house. It was remarkable.

It didn't feel like it was going to stop.

It was almost like drowning in stuff.

Most of us have a problem in our homes - they're just too full.

But maybe the future will be less about acquiring the latest things

and more about deciding what we actually need to hold on to.

I'm bringing round a lifestyle book with a cult following

that sold four million copies worldwide.

-Hi, guys. ALL:

-Hello, Giles.

Following its advice, the family are going to experiment

and create the perfect place to spend their 21st-century leisure time.

What we're going to do today

-is we're going to try and embrace your home of the future.

-Ooh.

So the way things have gone so far, you've got more and more stuff,

your house got a bit cluttered, what's the future?

More and more clutter? No room to move?

I think probably not.

I think space is probably what is going to be at a premium.

Technology is making it possible to get rid of records and CDs

and all these kinds of things.

Books, for example, you know, they could go.

The pictures, they could all really be on hand-held devices.

You could have an awful lot less stuff.

So I have bought a Japanese book,

The Life-Changing Magic Of Tidying by Marie Kondo.

The idea is you go around your house,

you find the stuff that's absolutely essential and that you love and you keep it.

Everything else, out on a skip.

-Do you think you can do that?

-Life-changing.

-I love it.

-I love the idea of it.

-What about you, Seth?

-You must have unnecessary stuff?

-No, I don't!

-You've got...

-You've got SO much stuff!

It's useful!

You've got, like, 100 books.

-It's on Giles and you.

-Those are useful.

You may have a problem with books. We may be having something of a bonfire.

I've got a long roll of bin bags

which I'd like you to FILL

with all the stuff that you thought you really needed

and then, sort of, envisage how the future's going to be.

It's a kind of mental exercise and a physical exercise.

I think two bags each to start should be enough.

Into the bags, out on the skip.

MUSIC: Pack Up by Eliza Doolittle

The family are going to try out this new trend for decluttering

and find out what their future home could look like.

First thing you have to do is discard as much as you can.

Yeah, the books need to go,

cos they can easily be downloaded onto...

one simple contraption now.

-And then never looked at again anyway.

-Yes!

I don't even know what that is so that can go into the bag straight away.

Ornaments in general.

But I'm going to KEEP the photo albums,

cos they bring me a great deal of joy.

From that shelf I will let you have one photo.

-HE SIGHS

-That's tough.

-I don't want to get rid of any of them.

-There's too many of Seth.

Yeah, but different stages of his life though, aren't they?

You can look at them on your phone, you can take pictures of them.

I think it would be this one.

Just a picture of Steph when we first met, 18 years ago. Aw...

OK, all the rest gone, please.

-All of them except one on that shelf.

-Yep.

Do the same on the bottom shelf.

-Otherwise I'll leave you to get on with it.

-Thank you very much.

-Have fun!

I mean, that's empty.

That's, er, Steph and I's wedding and honeymoon pictures.

Oh! Look at that.

There's our wedding certificate,

our marriage...

We thought we'd lost it!

I'll put that inside there. I'm going to keep that.

I'm also keeping the Godfather trilogy and the Dark Knight trilogy!

HE CHUCKLES

How are you getting on? Lots of books over there.

-You've got the Guinness World Of Records 2010 and 2012.

-Yeah.

What use is the 2010 one?

Records have either stood or broken by 2012.

-You don't get to have more than one Guinness Book Of Records.

-There are new ones.

-Hi, Daisy.

-Hello.

-I see you haven't started.

-I have!

-All of this can stay, pretty much.

-What's under the bed?

What are the spangly Wellington boots for?

-Like a load of keepsakes.

-Keepsakes?

You're 16 years old!

If you have keepsakes until you're my age,

you will not be able to breathe!

The future is not about keepsakes.

But why wouldn't you want, um, Buzz Lightyear?

It's a bit manky now...

Oh, come on!

You're not four years old - into the bag!

Birthday cards, no, no.

When you're my age, you're not going to look at them. In the bag.

-Do you get the principle?

-Yes.

-Everything goes.

-Oh!

-Everything.

-Oh!

Yes, but you have to have that.

-Why?

-Cos it's just a floppy flamingo.

-Yes.

It was very entertaining when you were two(!)

-SHRIEKING:

-No!

-In the bag!

-I might leave you to get on with it from here.

-Oh, yay, thank you(!)

No, I have to keep things like that.

This is my whole history of my life

and I don't want to throw away my history,

I want to keep it and remember it.

I don't want to throw it away.

PENGUIN SQUEAKS

-STEPH:

-I have got an electronic reading device,

BUT you can't beat books

and the pages feel amazing and it's got a smell to it.

I think there's something about, particularly with books,

there's something about making physical contact with what you're reading

that changes the experience of reading.

I'd be really sad if physical books disappeared entirely.

Hours later, the Ashby-Hawkins' home is looking pretty pared down.

Wow! Look at this!

This is amazing, isn't it?

-GROANING:

-No!

-What do you mean, no?

-I love it!

Look at this, this is the future. Look at the lack of clutter.

-DAISY:

-It's horrible.

-What?!

I'm really sad that there's no photos of Seth and I up there, just Mum.

-STEPH LAUGHS

-That's really rude.

-They know what you look like!

It doesn't feel like home, it feels like you live here, it's not where you...

Home needs that personal touch

and all that personal touch comes from your clutter. So you need it.

I don't think so. I think the clutter are props.

-All you need is what's inside your heart.

-No!

-And what's inside... That's not convincing, is it, really?

-No!

I like the process of going through and reassessing

what's important and what's not important.

But this is too much.

I just went for it. Huge cull, basically.

The books were the first to go.

I felt, actually, we didn't need them

and I like the bare space.

But the whole thing, though, about some stuff is not a question of need,

it's a question of enjoyment.

It's not about what you throw away, you had to make a choice about what you kept.

-It just feels really boring.

-You think you'd just hoard everything, throw nothing away?

I think it's much better having something in your hands

than actually seeing something on a screen.

I prefer that so much more cos it's sentimental.

I love the feeling of it all gone.

-SETH:

-The point of space is to be used.

You don't NEED space as a thing to do.

I don't like having empty shelves.

There's no point to empty shelves, otherwise why would you have a shelf there!

The point is, this is not the end.

It's not that you get rid of your stuff and there's nothing there.

It's about paving the way for the smarthome,

for the entirely digitised life.

Anything you need can be delivered in digital form and got rid of.

-DAISY:

-I don't like that. I remember in the different decades

when I got physical records and physical things like that,

I much preferred holding the music than just clicking it on my phone.

I'm ambivalent, really, cos I love new smart technology.

I find it really fascinating.

I don't like the idea of being reliant on it.

The way that you interact with it is much more satisfying and human as a result.

I think if you just got flatscreen you'd lose all of that.

For me the new smart technology has to address

that 3-D experiential thing

that it currently doesn't.

You're probably able to get hologram clutter,

where you just strip everything down

and then you can just have rubbish beamed into your room.

-ROB CHUCKLES

-I like it being clear.

It's not our family, that's what it is. It's just not us.

Although the family's house filled up over the decades,

there was one thing that seemed to disappear -

quality time together.

-STEPH:

-Our reason for wanting to do the whole experiment

was spending really good quality time with the kids.

To begin with, without many other distractions,

the family spent lots of time together,

even if it was just sitting around the wireless

after a hard day's work.

This is really difficult.

It's cos you're not... I hate to say it, baby, you're not doing it right.

LIVELY MUSIC

In the '60s, when 45% of families owned cars,

the Ashby-Hawkins were able to have fun together

on a day trip out to the seaside.

In the modern day, I wouldn't normally spend this length of time

with my family unless we were all forced to go out.

And then we'd probably all be on our phones if we had the chance.

The '70s appeared to be a golden time for family life...

Hole in one!

BICYCLE BELL RINGS

An international survey of 1977

reported that Britons saw themselves as the happiest people in the world.

With more equality, more money to spend

and technology that brought them together,

the Ashby-Hawkins were happier than ever.

The best decade for our family time was the '70s.

'It was just entertaining

'and you forget how funny your family are'

when you're upstairs all the time.

So it's really nice to spend time with them

and I think it really made us so much stronger.

But as the decades progressed,

the family became more fragmented

with new products aimed at the individual

and work eating up more of their leisure time...

In the '80s it feels as though we're all going off on separate paths

and we need a way to get us back together again.

In the '90s, that meant buying quality family time together...

-DAISY:

-Oh, my God! It's amazing!

..at organised holiday parks.

That was so good.

I want to do it again, again, again and again.

But back at home,

the draw of technology was pulling the family further apart...

I miss my children, I have to say.

We've been replaced by gadgets

and electrical toot.

The problem we face today

is that, while we claim to want to spend quality time with our friends and family,

whenever we do,

we find our attention endlessly diverted by the lure of our smartphone

and we end up trying to be in two places at the same time.

Spending quality time together is becoming harder to do

and the home is no longer the place to do it,

as our beloved technology always seems to get in the way.

To give the Ashby-Hawkins a taste of how family time might look in the future,

I'm sending them somewhere with no modern technology at all -

a digital detox in the middle of nowhere.

As technology continues to innovate

and invades further into our leisure time,

the future may be full of places like this

where we can unplug and really spend time together.

So here we are in the middle of nowhere.

There's no Wi-Fi, no electricity, no phone, nothing.

You're completely cut off.

This is the sort of thing I imagine people will do deliberately in the future.

There's going to be so much technology,

it's going to be impossible to downscale it or escape from time to time.

You're just going to have to disappear.

Do you think you can live with it?

-Can you do this?

-Yes, I'd love to be unplugged from the world... Would be wonderful.

I think that particularly hand-held technology intrudes on everything.

It's like having a really, irritating rude person standing with you.

What about you, Daisy?

I can see how it's appealing,

I can see how it would be nice to get an escape,

but not having my phone, I do feel a bit...

Are you feeling twitchy about what your friends are doing?

Selfies that might have been posted in the last ten minutes that you've not been able to see?!

Get rid of it and come here and just breathe the air.

Over the experiment, I've felt so much more serene

than at any time in my adult life, I think.

So it's kind of ironic that in the future

people will be paying to do a digital retreat like this

just in order to experience the thing that you've had all summer.

Do you think it's really necessary to come all this way

to escape from technology?

Couldn't you have a digital detox in your own home?

Have a period of time where everything's turned off?

I think that would be really, really difficult.

We have got a piece of kit,

well, at least one or two pieces of kit

in every single room in our house.

The future technology that you've experienced,

the bikes with the screen around you and your drones,

do you think technology is going to enhance your experience

and free you up from the screen?

This technology was, like, go outside, have fun with your friends,

rather than talking to them over a computer.

So I actually did say that I would give up my computer for one...

for just spending time with my friends like that.

And that's not a thing I say lightly!

EVERYONE LAUGHS

Hearing Seth say that is a bit of a revelation, really, to be honest.

But, correct me if I'm wrong,

it wasn't as good as camping in the woods with me and having Spam...

THEY LAUGH

Hmm.

I just hark back to the '70s when we had such a good, simple,

good, clean fun and I just think it's a real shame that we lose that.

So what was so good about the '70s, then?

There wasn't too much TV, there wasn't too much radio,

there wasn't too much technology.

The '70s was like this beautiful golden era

where we were all together for a lot of the time

and that made us just more relaxed.

We just had fun.

I don't think I've laughed so much with my family ever.

Do you think there might be a way of harnessing that 1970s family vibe

and replaying it in the 21st century?

We should do, maybe, once a month, a night

where we do stuff together,

where our technology gets left at the door and we do something.

Right, well, then we will leave you to enjoy your family time together.

-Have fun.

-Thanks very much.

-Bye.

In Britain, we've undergone a dramatic revolution

in how we spend our leisure time since the 1950s

and the Ashby-Hawkins have experienced that first hand.

They've gone from hard work and conformity

to a world full of technology

and the freedom to do whatever they choose.

My life now in comparison to what I have lived through

is one of choice and comfort and relaxation, really.

I'm lucky.

-SETH:

-I'm just burning my entire marshmallow right now.

I think the thing I learnt

was that everyone in my family

secretly likes everybody else in our family.

-DAISY:

-The most important thing to me

is to not take my freedom for granted.

I've seen how teenagers have changed over the decades

and I really appreciate that much more.

The trick is not to make the marshmallow fall in the fire.

The most fun was all four of us together...

No, no, no!

..doing something we all enjoy,

not something that just one of us enjoys.

You can see that being together was the most important thing.

MUSIC: I Wouldn't Change A Thing by Coke Escovedo

And they're off!

We've bonded a lot more strongly over this process...

-# Oh, I wouldn't change a thing! #

-Daisy's the winner!

..and I think the whole experiment has made me be much more conscious

about being in the moment with someone

because all the stuff that you surround yourself with

comes and goes throughout your life,

but the memories are what stay with you for ever

and that's what I wanted out of this thing, was really good memories

and I've got...

-SHE SNIFFS

-..loads.

-WELLING UP:

-It's great.

Oh, God, I said I wouldn't cry! I'm crying again.

It's just been brilliant.

Whatever we do in the future,

whether it's a world full of unrecognisable new technology

or one that doesn't look all that different from today,

I'm sure that the one thing that will always make us happiest

is spending time with the people we love.

# Oh, I wouldn't change a thing

# If I had to live my life all over

# Oh, baby

# Yeah, yeah

# I'd do it all again

# If I had to live my life all over

# Well, I'd live the life that's full

# But all that I've learned has led me straight to you, babe

# And that's my only concern

# Oh, I wouldn't change a thing... #