Back In Time For The Corner Shop, a five-part series airing on ABC TV and ABC iview, premieres on Tuesday, March 7, at 8 p.m.
For over a century, millions of Australians relied on their neighbourhood corner store. It served as much more to the community than just a store. While it’s true that you can get just about anything with a few clicks of a mouse, nothing beats remembering the days when you could stroll down to the local corner store and pick up some snacks with your allowance or have a friendly conversation with the bakery owner as you picked up some fresh bread.
Throughout the series Back In Time For The Corner Shop, Annabel Crabb is there to support the Ferrone family—Carol, Peter, Julian, Sienna, and Olivia—through the ups and downs of running a business across 150 years of Australian history. The Ferrones’ next journey will begin in the 1850s, taking them further back in time than they’ve ever gone before.
The scenes from Back In Time For The Corner Shop were shot in a cosy Sydney suburb called Botany, at a location that had housed a corner store. For the first time in the show’s history, the public were invited to join the Ferrones to shop and experience “time travel” alongside the family.
Family members were joined by some very special visitors who shed light on the many times they lived through. Jeff Fatt, John Doyle, and Lex Marinos are just a few of the guests who can speak from personal experience about life in a family business. They were aided in this endeavour by Ita Buttrose, Linda Burney, Pam Burridge, and Craig Foster, all of whom contributed valuable insight into the cultural and societal developments that have affected our lives and practises.
The cultural, economic, and political shifts that occurred between the 1850s and the 1990s are explored in Back In Time For The Corner Shop. And we may observe how the corner store’s function has evolved and how its standing as a communal hub has changed.
The Ferrone family’s struggles and triumphs spanning 60 years of Australian history from the 1950s to the present were first revealed to the Australian public in the 2018 series Back In Time For Dinner. The Ferrones travelled in time from Federation to the 1940s with their food and cooking in Further Back in Time for Dinner.
Produced by Warner Bros. International Television Production for the ABC. Warner Bros. Head of Entertainment Caroline Swift. Warner Bros. Supervising Executive Producer Nicole Rogers. Executive Producer Clare Bath. ABC Acting Head of Factual Richard Huddleston. ABC Factual Manager Julie Hanna. ABC Executive Producer Madeleine Hawcroft.