PS on the simple life

After yesterday’s post on simple living I was reminded by a television advert that there is a long history of popular culture lauding the simple life. Evidently the Little House on the Prairie, a 1974-1983 television series depicting a family in a village in the American Midwest in the late nineteenth century, is now available on DVD. It is based on books which were first published in America in the midst of the Great Depression of the 1930s. Other television programmes on a similar theme include the Waltons (1972-1981), on a family facing rural hardship in Virginia in the 1930s, and the Good Life (1975-78 – called Good Neighbours in America), a comedy on a couple who decide to opt out of the “rat race” in suburban Britain.