Launching this week, the weekly podcast is centred around the ‘Pass It On’ column in The Sunday Post newspaper, where housewives of the 50s would share their tips and little pieces of hard-won advice on the correct running of a household.
The best of these tips, nearly 1,200 of them, were collated from The Sunday Post archives for the book ‘Pass It On’, and now the Pass It On podcast explores a new dimension to the tips.
Host Connie, a 21 year-old first time homeowner, is joined by Steve, author of ‘Pass It On’, who is firmly entrenched in the old ways, and Chris, a modern man pitched somewhere between the curmudgeonly old and the all-new-ideas young.
The tips are, says DC Thomson Media, often funny, sometimes delightfully dated and dubious, but on occasion still useful even today. They are also, though, a fascinating social history insight into the 1950s, and a way of reflecting on what’s changed, for good and ill.
Host Connie, said, “Some of the tips are a little bit useful, but I keep having to tell Steve that no modern house-owner will ever clean their floors with sour milk! I keep thinking of how tasks like dish-washing and ironing are a lot easier than it sounds like they were in the 1950s. But I’m enjoying telling Steve that some of his old tips are just crazy.”
Author Steve Finan said, “If you had a beetroot stain in a tablecloth, or wanted to dust behind an immovable wardrobe, or needed advice on what to do if you’d scorched a white shirt with the iron, then you’d take advice from the best housewives who ever lived — the hard-working, house-proud, hugely-capable Scottish housewives of the 1950s.”
Throughout the podcast, the team discuss what we can learn from generations before them, exploring the vastly different mindset of the 1950s compared to today. With three very different ideas about life, and cleaning, the podcast has a viewpoint from all angles, say the publishers.
Producer and presenter Chris Phin said, “The tips themselves are a starting point, but they’re just an excuse to explore changing attitudes to housekeeping, gender equality, privilege, thrift, throwaway culture, and more! We discuss whether the old ways were always better, if new attitudes really are more sophisticated, and whether tomorrow will be shaped by new ideas or rehashed old ideas.”
