Pioneer House (C4); Soul Deep - The Story Of Black Popular Music (BBC2): Take away the comforts of 21st Century living from people and you get a variety of reactions.

Some of those chosen to follow in the footsteps of the founding fathers in C4's latest historical reality show are clearly going to enjoy the experience more than others.

Others will struggle to adjust, as indicated in the tasty titbits from future episodes shown in the pre-credit sequence. We can expect much conflict and suffering as the participants play at being the Pilgrim Fathers.

Seventeen men, women and children have been transported to a remote spot in Maine, in the US, to live as those who built a nation did back in the 17th Century. The conditions promise to be hard, food scarce and labour back-breaking.

Previous experiments in shows such as The Edwardian Country House and The Frontier House have taught viewers, if not participants, that it's a lot harder than you can possibly imagine.

There are the master and slave relationships to adjust to, as well as having a governor who, in real life, is a Baptist minister in Waco. When his wife, Tammy, talks about God and there being a purpose in them being there, she's clearly taking it more seriously than 26-year-old Mancunian Paul. God's purpose isn't uppermost in his mind. The beer rations are - eight pints a month.

He's one of only two British people there. The other is old Etonian Dominick, who wants to "test myself" physically, mentally and spiritually. One woman is already being tested by the period dress. "These clothes are murder, how did people live in this clothing?" she moaned.

The group is living in four cottages modelled on archaeological evidence of colonial settlements. They even have possibly-hostile Passamaquaddy Indians roaming around on the outskirts of the village.

We left the settlers at the end of the first episode cold, hungry and ill. Governor Jeff Wyre's son summed up the feelings of many of them when he asked his father: "Why are we doing this, Daddy? Please let us go home."

Singer Sam Cooke was a pioneer too. The Gospel Highway, the second part of Soul Deep, told how he changed popular music forever. A lofty claim but the evidence was there to show how black church music was introduced into mainstream pop.

Cooke's stature was such that Muhammed Ali insisted the singer be allowed through the crowd to be photographed with him ringside after his 1964 defeat of Sonny Liston.

Gospel in the 1950s was an underground form of show business, carried out in the black communities. Cooke crossed over - "reaching across the border" as Bobby Womack put it. His example, and success, encouraged others to do the same.

He was a songwriter and shrewd businessman. Cooke died young, in his early thirties. He was shot dead in a motel in a rundown part of Los Angeles. The circumstances have never been clearly explained, and this programme wasn't about to solve the mystery. Unlike many TV documentaries, there was no interest in digging up the dirt. There were virtually no details about his private life. This showed admirable restraint but left me feeling a bit cheated. I wanted to know more about the man as well as his music.

Published: 16/05/2005