Couple reveal life's turns since Iron Age

They starred in one of TV's first reality shows and now the cameras have returned to find out how life has changed for a Shropshire couple.

Peter Little and Jill Grainger left behind the luxuries and practicalities of life in 1978 to find out about what life was like in the Iron Age, as part of a BBC 2 landmark documentary, Living in the Past.

Moving to a secluded village in Dorset, they spent just over a year learning how to grow crops and rear livestock.

Now the couple, of Buildwas, are preparing to reveal how they have got on over the years in a new BBC 4 programme, What Happened Next?

Viewers will find out how Peter, now a 56-year-old social worker, and Jill, a 59-year-old teacher, keep a smallholding where they rear and slaughter their own animals.

They even occasionally use the same stone quern from Living in the Past to grind their own corn.

Jill, who works at Severndale School in Shrewsbury, admitted: "It's a highly labour-intensive way of producing flour."Jill has said previously: "One of the most influential things is that we have retained the friendships that we made and they are as strong as family ties. We see each other regularly.

"We are all keen gardeners. We have a big garden here and keep our own animals - sheep and chickens.

"We have not lost the idea that we value things that are handmade and the effort that people have put in to making them which is perhaps not really part of today's culture."

And almost 20 years later Jill and Peter's son, Tom Little, who now lives in Bangor, followed in their footsteps. In 2000 when he took part in a BBC television series called Surviving the Iron Age.

For almost seven weeks he and Ceris Williams, of Ironbridge, lived as Iron Age inhabitants on a Welsh hillside from mid September to early November last year.

They had to contend with the wettest October on record which turned their camp into a mud bath and accustom their taste buds to a bland Iron Age diet comprising of dried beans, peas, kale, grain, meat and goats' cheese and milk.

Tom was asked to go on the documentary because his parents' involvement in Living In The Past and felt obliged to take part.

The show is to be screened on BBC 4 on May 20.

By Lisa Rowley