Fly on the Wall

I have never been a fan of Fly on the Wall television. How can one be natural with cameras following one about? There was a programme on TV about a family who were expected to live as in wartime Britain. It was doomed to fail because they lived differently from their peacetime neighbours. In the 1940s we were all in the same boat. We were all affected by rationing, the blackout, bombing, the worry about and separation from our loved ones, when was it all going to end, but there was a spirit of community that comes from shared anxieties and fears and shared pleasures, too, when something nice happened.
I was remembering how kind people in the USA and Australia would send food parcels to friends and relatives during rationing. The arrival of a parcel was so exciting. The contents would be shared with friends and neighbours - things we hadn't seen for ages like dried fruit and tinned ham and tinned peaches. Nobody starved but our diet was very monotous. You get something of the atmosphere if you read "84, Charing Cross Road" where the American writer is appalled to hear of our food shortages even after the war ended (rationing went on until about 1954) that she sent food parcels to the staff of a bookshop in London.
Of course, we weren't all saints. There were "wide boys" selling stockings off ration from a suitcase in Oxford Street keeping one step ahead of the police. (You might find when you unwrapped your illicit stockings that they weren't a pair, being different in size or colour) There was also the "Black market" and things sold under the counter. But the vast majority of the population were honest and law abiding and, what's more generous and kind-hearted as I think we are today. It is the horrid ones who make the headlines in the papers. If it were otherwise it wouldn't be news.