Father and husband Peter is the son of Italians who arrived in the early 1950s; mother-wife Carol's background isn't stated on air, but the press notes reveal she was born in Britain of Portuguese heritage and moved here aged eight. Their children – Olivia, 10, Sienna, 14, and Julian, 17 – are thus thoroughly modern Australians: born here, but with strong cultural links to elsewhere.

Food in Australia is, in effect, the soft diplomacy of multiculturalism; however negatively some white Australians might feel about immigrants, there's a good chance they like some of the stuff they eat. And once that hurdle is crossed, others often follow.

That's the unstated agenda of Back in Time, I suspect (and I am fine with that), but there's nothing preachy about the show. It skips through the decades (one decade per week from 1950, with the family spending a day in each year, give or take) with all the breeziness of kids playing dress-ups.

Occasionally, though, it does cut a little deeper. The 1950s are especially hard on Carol, an executive training consultant with her own business. She finds herself stuck in the kitchen from dawn till dusk (the typical 1950s Australian housewife did an average 77 hours of housework per week, the show claims). With Peter, the household's normal cook, confined to the dining room awaiting his evening meal, Carol is in tears from exhaustion by day two; he's not doing much better, feeling utterly isolated as he sits alone at the table, the head of his household but also a stranger to them.

The walls begin to come down a little in the 1960s, but it's not until the 1970s that the open-plan living arrangement presages the move to a more equal footing both inside the home and out.

"I'm going to work. What do you think of that," says Carol in 1974, barely able to contain her excitement.

"You've been waiting for a couple of decades," says Peter, hoping this means he'll soon be able to get back in the kitchen (his moment finally arrives in 1977).

The dismissal of the Whitlam government is consumed in front of the TV, to the accompaniment of a frozen dinner. The kids struggle with dial phones and cassette tapes, and Oliver watches Skyhooks perform Living in the '70s on Countdown, pronouncing it "the most horrific thing I've ever seen".

It's cute, fast, breezy and it does have something to say about the way the evolution of our domestic arrangements and our palates have both shaped and been shaped by forces outside the home. But as history goes, it's more convenience food than three-course meal.

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