Of course, we could just ask the homeless for tips on finding the choicest sleeping spots under the freeway or the best dumpsters to rummage. Or we could go to the working poor for advice on feeding and housing a family on minimum wage. But that's not nearly as titillating as watching CBS's castaways eat rats for $1 million. Is it any surprise that "Survivor" pulls in its highest Nielsen ratings in households with incomes over $80,000 and its lowest in households with incomes under $30,000?

Middle-class Americans fear hardship, yet crave it, because it's been bred out of most of us -- which was why there was such a festive air to all that pre-Y2K stocking of the larder. And which is why "Survivor" is the perfect show for our times: It's all about facing contrived hardship. The castaways may have to forage for food, but there's a medical team standing by; the show also provides them with all the sunblock, Band-Aids, iodine, anti-diarrheal medicine, tampons, aspirin, condoms and contact-lens cleaning solution they need to rough it in relative comfort. Let's face it: "Survivor" is so popular with well-off viewers because it offers a vicarious respite from the privileges of modern life we're always complaining about. How long could we go without cell phones, hot showers, e-mail, microwave popcorn and TV? Would we just die without our DVD players and fruit smoothies?

A year ago, Britain's Channel 4 asked a similar question in "The 1900 House," a reality TV series that held British viewers in thrall the way "Survivor" is gripping American viewers now. Channel 4 held auditions to find a family who would be willing to live for three months as a middle-class family would have in 1900 London. The family would move into a turn-of-the-century Victorian house that had been stripped of all modern amenities -- goodbye electricity, indoor toilets, central heating -- and restored back to the days of gaslit lamps, outhouses and coal-burning stoves. The family would have to observe Victorian modes of dress and entertainment, and eat and use only those foods and products that would have been available to a middle-class family in Britain in 1900. A camera crew would be there every day to record the experiment, and there would also be a "video diary" camera set up in a closet where the family members could confess things they didn't want the others to hear.

A psychologist was invited to review the hundreds of audition tapes, in hopes of finding a family who would be able to put up with one another for three months without any of the modern distractions that make family life bearable. A pudgy dandy named Daru Rooke, who curates a museum about Victorian life, oversaw the restoration of the house with a kind of sadistic glee, making sure that every article of furniture and clothing, every bit of food and medicine, every household implement, was authentic. The resulting series, the four-part "1900 House," began its first American run on PBS last week; it's an intimate, eye-opening and completely fascinating look at how radically domestic life has changed over the past 100 years.

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