BBC News - Today - What's on your mantelpiece? An intense study of the lives of people in Britain called Mass Observation was started 75 years ago. They tasked a team of volunteer observers to record people's thoughts and behaviour on a diverse range of topics: everything from the private lives of midwives to thoughts on race and class; they called the project Mass Observation. To mark the anniversary the Today programme is going through the archive and have been running a number of reports. This time the programme is looking at: What's on your Mantelpiece? It was a genuine question posed in the first year of Mass Observation. Allan Little reports.