During the filming of the ABC's historical "immersion" show, Back In Time For The Corner Shop, Carol Ferrone wondered if the producers' dedication to accuracy was a bit over the top when the period outfits she was given to wear extended to underwear from the era.
"Even our bras are authentic to the period," she says.
"In the opening scene of Back In Time For The Corner Shop I show eight layers of clothing I'm wearing [from the 1850s] but in the 1950s I had to wear these pointy bras. I said to Rosie, our head of wardrobe, 'nobody will know if I'm wearing my bra I bought from Bras N Things' and she said, 'Carol, people will ring into the ABC and say Carol's boobs don't look right for the period — excuse my French — they will know'. So, I said, 'OK, I'll wear your pointy bra from 1955'. The attention to detail is just phenomenal."
Back In Time For The Corner Shop is the third series Carol Ferrone and her family, husband Peter and children, Julian, Sienna and Olivia signed up for. It all started when they were spotted in a shopping centre by a talent scout and made their TV debut on Back In Time For Dinner in 2018 and then went back for seconds with Further Back In Time For Dinner in 2020.
"We were at the shops, and somebody tapped me on the shoulder and said, 'I like the look of your family, are you interested in auditioning for this TV show?" Carol recalls.
"Funnily enough, I'd actually seen the casting call on social media about three months prior and had sent it to Peter and said, you know, we should apply for this, but we were too busy and never got around to it. The producers had been looking for months and hadn't found the right family and turned out we were the right family.
"We had no idea what we were getting into — not that we wouldn't have done it anyway — and we had no idea how successful the show would be. I felt like at the very least we're going to have a really great seven-part family home video to show our grandkids, but it's been a really fun experience for us to do together and we've learned so much, as a family, about our Indigenous culture and the evolution of Australia as a people and a culture.
"Julian and I are history buffs and we feel like we are making history relevant and relatable. It's been hard at times but it makes me emotional to think how wonderful this experience has been."
In the latest series, the Ferrones and host Annabel Crabb explore the history of the corner shop over 150 years from the 1850s to the 1990s.
It is filmed in a former corner store (until 2016) in the Sydney suburb of Botany.
While they love the experience it's a big commitment for the family. They put their lives on hold for three months to be filmed for seven days straight, living – and, most entertainingly, eating their way — through each decade and then a four-day break while sets are changed over. For Back In Time For the Corner Shop they lived the entire seven-day filming block on set – Peter and Carol and the girls sleeping in two makeshift bedrooms at the back of the shop, while Julian slept in a room shared with wardrobe.
"It's a 24-hour full immersion," Carol says.
"It's not like the crew goes home at 9 or 10 o'clock at night or whenever we finish filming and then we flick on our laptops and TVs and order UberEats, we live 24 hours, seven days in that period. In this series, we got a TV when we got to filming the 1950s era but prior to that we had no television, there's no mobile phones.
"Our bed that you won't even see in the show had these beautiful 1900s hand embroidered – mind you itchy — sheets and last season in Further Back In Time … our mattress was a straw bloody mattress!! I think they like to torture us.
"Even when we go home for a few days in between set changes we actually try to keep eating to the period otherwise we can get sick, which we did experience a little bit in the last couple of seasons. It throws your system out of whack. So, we truly live according to whatever decade that we're up to."
Creating an authentic set is the job of production designer and art director Jason Schara and his team. Once the show's researchers come up with storylines for each decade he gets to work on the design.
"Authenticity in this show is everything," he says.
"I trawl the internet looking for photos from each era and I spend a lot of time at the Sydney Living Museums. Those guys are great, they've worked with me over the years, and I spend a lot of time poring over magazines, books, early publications and department store catalogues, hand etchings and drawings, whatever we can get our hands on and we just absorb and absorb.
"I might have an idea of what the episode or era should look like but when we go out and try to find stuff, we might find something that changes the original idea. It's almost like you go find something and design around it in reverse, for example, say you found a couch from 1920 and you might have been going in one direction but the couch is amazing so you might have to change your colour palette or flooring or the wallpaper to suit that couch."
Jason Schara has a team of enthusiastic buyers who search the internet, Facebook Marketplace, eBayn and auction houses to source items. Among the great discoveries have been people with extensive private collections who have been happy to share their bits and pieces.
"Our collectors are amazing," Schara says.
"I have one guy who just collects stoves and he's got stoves from the early 1800s to around the 1950s-60s.
"We've found people who collect signage and there's a radio guy who has around 1,000 radios all around his house from different eras. And we might be struggling to find something and often a conversation with one of them will lead to them saying, 'oh I know another guy' who might have that'. So, we've managed to find all this stuff that otherwise would be impossible to find.
"There are also some pieces that weren't too far away from ending up in landfill and we have rebuilt or repaired it and then we send it back into society to give it another life. Everyone gets excited when a new piece comes in and we find something that's perfect for what we're doing, it looks good and it's in great condition."
His team's greatest challenge this time around was recreating packaging for food in the early episodes of the show and then, surprisingly, finding props from more recent times.
"The big one with the Corner Shop was if we found original packaging, like can labels or cereal packets, it was never in the condition that we needed it to be," he says.
"If, for example, we're doing something from the early 1900s, we are supposed to be living as if it's the 1900s so the packaging needs to look new so we'd have to make multiples of cereal boxes and canned goods. But the hardest years to do were the 1980s when throwaway culture started. Everything was chucked away so that was really difficult."
The first series, Back In Time For Dinner, was filmed in the Ferrone's own home, with the downstairs interior being ripped apart and remodelled several times.
"Carol's house is open plan and she was really worried when I told her I was going to rip out her kitchen and move it to the other side of the house and divide up the house into smaller living spaces because in the past they had a separate dining room, separate kitchen, separate everything," Jason says.
"Architecturally, it was quite cool as I worked backwards. I knew I was going to end up with an open plan house, so I started dividing it up and made it like a puzzle and then every decade another room would open up."
"It was mind-blowing, our house was gutted and renovated eight times," Carol recalls.
"They built rooms within our rooms. Upstairs became the production office and the only rooms they didn't touch downstairs were the bathroom and the laundry. During filming, I'd be sitting in 'our' 1950s lounge room, our open staircase had been boarded up and a fake fireplace put on it and I remember thinking I don't know where I am in my own home. The only time I would get my bearings would be when somebody walked into the bathroom and opened the door and I thought oh, OK, this is where I am. Then each decade, as the house became slightly more modernised, I'd start to see our original home start to emerge again."
Previous series were filmed mostly over the summer school holidays, and the Ferrones have been able to juggle their work and school/university commitments around filming.
"We film a lot over weekends, and we got to go home over the four-day break, although it's not much of a break because we have wardrobe fittings and other things we do in between," Carol says.
"Olivia went back to school and did a mix of distance education as well. Julian had finished university this time and delayed finding a job until filming finished and Peter and I run our own businesses so we're fortunate that that's how we can do this, it would be a bit hard to take three months out of your job to film a TV show."
It's given them a public profile and while they're appearing in a high-brow 'reality' TV show, Carol Ferrone says they've never worried about how they are going to be portrayed and have had mostly positive feedback.
"The great thing about working for the ABC is we're very protected, it's not like a commercial station where we have to worry about how we're going to be edited or if we are going to be perceived in any negative manner, we're very well taken care of," Carol says.
"I cry a lot in the show. I'm a very emotional person and being vulnerable is part and parcel of the whole experience. I never want us to be fake or not be genuine and authentic. So, if that means the cameras film me ugly cry, I'm OK with that because that's showing vulnerability and authenticity.
"The feedback we've had has been 99.9 per cent positive. Olivia might get the odd, silly comment at school, but her response has always been 'well I have a TV show and you don't'. Peter and I would never put ourselves in a position where it would harm any of our kids or our family, we don't need our five minutes of fame.
"When I'm recognised in the street, I have elderly people saying to me, 'I remember my grandfather telling me war stories like you experienced' in the show or school children who ask was the tripe really gross? We get recognised for a TV show that is positive and educational and because of our show I do school visits. I'm not paid for it but I love it. Teachers reach out to me and say 'you have made learning history fun', school children relate to my kids. I really feel like we're teachers."
For the first time in the series, Back In Time For The Corner Shop includes direct interaction with members of the public, which both the Ferrone family and the production crew say has been a highlight.
"We really did become part of this community of Botany," Carol says.
"Our corner shop was not a real corner shop but we became emotionally invested in it and we made friends with locals who we are still friends with. They said to us when we finished filming please stay, we'll support you guys if you actually open a corner store which was actually really lovely. And that's what we learnt about the corner shop, it's about nostalgia and it's about community.
"The local corner shop brought people together and I think now with online and supermarket self-serve we are lacking that and it's sad. I think our little show will highlight that we're missing that."
After three series, Carol Ferrone is as enthusiastic as ever and willing to throw herself back in time should the producers tap her on the shoulder again.
"There have been a few ideas thrown around by the audience and some have said they'd love to see us do Back In Time For Christmas," she says.
"And I think that would be a lot of fun — I know they've done it in the UK — but I must say that sort of cooking Christmas dinner every single day is very daunting."
Watch Back in Time for the Corner Shop, presented by Annabel Crabb, on ABC TV and iview at 8pm on Tuesdays.
