Coal House & Coal House at War

This Welsh series  is absolutely brilliant.  It sets up several families in a community of coal miners and their families.  Series 1 is set in 1927 and the second is set in 1944.  My favorite historical reality series of all time is 1940s House and these two series, especially the second, is all that and a whole bunch more!  Set up as a community, you get to explore more issues, like neighbors helping, taking in children who were evacuated from the cities during the Blitz, and working in the mines.  Like in the 1940s House, the rabbits survive, but a few chickens and a pig named after Adolph Hitler end up on the table.

Nevertheless, 1940s house is still my favorite, probably because with just one family a viewer gets a
really up close and personal account of World War II on the homefront.

As far as I know Series 1 is the only historical reality show set in the 1920s.

It blows my mind that the United States not done historical reality shows set in the 20th century at all!  Maybe it's the hard time of letting go of modern life that the earlier participants had that made the producers give up on the Americans.  Watch Colonial House, for example, and you'll see how some of participants, Americans all of them, whined and complained and refused to play along with the social rules of the time.  The British ones were not happy all the time, but they were dang good sports the whole time.  Okay, there was that one English dude who snuck into town, but he was suitably abashed upon his return and worked hard for the remainder. 

I remember one participant in Frontier House wondering how in the world could a person work so hard, wish and want so much to be a part of something so unique and rare, and then blow it off?  Just because you have to work hard and do without for a few weeks! 

Don't even get me started on Texas Ranch House!

In any case, the families in both Coal House series were troopers and I learned a lot and have been seriously inspired to work harder on my cooking skills.

I still wish like crazy the Americans would make at least one more, preferably life on the homefront during World War II.  All I could find was this informative, but boring documentary from the Hoover Library-   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34xA61v8WhQ