TV History in the Cultural Ghetto

Tristram Hunt was today dragged into the dispute over Andrew Marr’s BBC TV series The Making of Modern Britain, discussing the issue of history on television with Marr’s vociferous critic Charles Moore on Radio 4’s Today programme.

The package began with three excerpts: from Kenneth Clark’s 1969 TV series Civilisation (all clipped tones and cultural certainties); Laurence Olivier, raising the art of narration to its zenith in Thames TV’s The World at War; then Andrew Marr talking about posh, possibly very cruel, people in hats.

Moore gave the impression of a man who simply doesn’t like television, regarding it as an intrusion (sometimes I know how he feels) into his Trollopian, High Tory world. Tristram Hunt is a fan of TV: since the debacle of his series on the Civil War (which Moore, then the Daily Telegraph’s editor, urged the BBC to pull halfway through its run), Hunt has proved himself to be an inspired public historian (if you want proof, read his excellent column in this week’s Guardian).

But I have to disagree with him on one thing. He talked of his recent experience watching Andrew Marr’s series with a class of 14-year-olds in Walthamstow, north-east London. Despite its silly stunts and simplicities, they find it boring. I suspect that some children find everything boring. From this single experience, Hunt concluded that to grab the attention of ‘inner city’ youngsters one would be inclined to make ever more whizz-bang TV, with fast edits, crude simplicities and trite modern-day parallels. At least that is what Hunt’s logic dictates.

But I simply don’t believe that to be the case. Inner city youngsters are just as capable of understanding proper history as anyone else, but it is quite unlikely that they have ever been exposed to it, certainly not on television in the way that an ‘inner city’ youngster of my generation was.

As I remember (and I watched every episode when it was originally shown, with great anticipation) The World at War was shown prime time on ITV. It was superbly written by proper historians, brilliantly narrated (by Olivier) and edited, by Jeremy Isaacs. Civilisation, similarly, and such programmes – and there were many others – appeared on BBC1, mingled with light entertainment, sport and news.

That is no longer the case. Diarmaid MacCulloch’s History of Christianity is tucked away on the cultural ghetto of BBC4 (and will probably eventually appear, late night, on BBC2). A bright, curious working-class teenager is unlikely to come across it by happenstance after an episode of Eastenders (though it is considerably more uplifting).

OK, one might say, what kind of teenager will be interested in MacCulloch’s programme other than those families who have BBC4 and Radio 4 as default channels. Fair enough. But the BBC has just thrown away a remarkable opportunity to attract a great number of youngsters to engage in serious history.

Its series, A History of the World in 100 Objects launches early next year. It’s a brilliant premise: each programme takes as its subject an object from the BM’s vast collection – a flint hammer from stone age Africa; an Aztec serpent; the statue of an Indian god or the Roman Emperor Hadrian; a relic from the Industrial Revolution – and its fascinating story is told.

What a visual treat, what wonderful stories, perfect for all the family, they will follow or precede Eastenders on a daily basis. Or rather they won’t. The stories of these visually remarkable objects will be told on – Radio 4. These stories, it seems, are too good for the proles who also pay the licence fee. Which suggests that the BBC no longer speaks or even seeks to speak to one nation, but two. There is BBC4, Radio 4 and (the utterly superb) Radio 3 for the educated and aspirational. And there is BBC1 and, increasingly, BBC2 for the rest. Or shall we call it ‘BBC2, D’. It is a shocking betrayal of the BBC’s historical role to inform, educate and entertain, and they will pay a heavy price in the long run.

From A.J.P. Taylor’s mesmerising lectures in front of a black backdrop to technicolour Civilisation and the ground-breaking World At War, Taylor Downing looks at the early days of history on television in Screen Saviours: History in Television

Moore V Marr

Charles Moore has endured heroically all of Andrew Marr’s BBC TV series The Making of Modern Britain and passes judgment on it in the Telegraph today. Moore is a practiced contrarian who has it in for the BBC, but he does make valid points. Marr’s series is predictable in its establishment views, lacks the mischievousness of the best television histories (think of AJP Taylor) and the visual gimmicks are embarrassing (dodgy Home Guard uniforms, silly bathing suits etc). An opportunity missed.

The Grierson Awards

At the Grierson Awards last night, the annual jamboree for documentary film-makers, the History Today Award for Best Historical Documentary went to John Dower for Thriller in Manila, a look at the world heavyweight title fight between Muhammad Ali and ‘Smokin’’ Joe Frazier. It was original in the fact that it is told from the point of view of Frazier, a bull of a man still plainly hurt by the caustic verbal assault Ali unleashed upon him in the build up to the fight, calling him, among many other things, ‘gorilla’ and ‘Uncle Tom’.

I was part of the judging process, which included historians such as Diarmaid MacCulloch (author of an interesting recent article on the Papal appeal to disgruntled Anglicans) and Anna Whitelock, as well as a host of documentary filmmakers. For me, the process raised a number of points.

Almost certainly for reasons of archive, the 20th century dominates history documentaries. It was really quite striking how few documentaries are made about the Middle Ages, the early modern period and the Classical world, eras which are hugely popular among those who consume their history in print. Only a few major historians, most notably David Starkey, get to present serious television histories set in the distant past, and even then it’s the Tudors. Is television unable to convey the realities of life previous to the 20th century, or are film-makers simply unwilling to tackle serious history?

By the way, the host of last night’s awards, Andrew Marr, a former winner himself, is currently in the midst of an entertaining spat with the Daily Telegraph’s Charles Moore over the ‘left-wing’ bias of his new BBC history of (stifle the yawn) 20th-century Britain. Oh for a big-budget history series on the Civil Wars, the Glorious Revolution or the Anglo-Saxons.

Peter Furtado introduces the remarkable work of award-winning historical documentary film-maker Norma Percy, in Can TV Make History?

Terror!

Terror! Robespierre and the French Revolution, broadcast on BBC2 on Saturday and available on iPlayer, was the best television history documentary in a very long while. Written and directed by Mark Hayhurst it told the story of the events of 1793 when Maximilian Robespierre and a small coterie of similarly fanatical revolutionaries established the Committee of Public Safety, deciding for themselves what was good for the people of France. Terror was unleashed, the very calendar around which people organised their lives was changed, the Gallic church was replaced by the worship of the ‘Supreme Being’.

Unusually, the dramatic reconstructions of the meeting of the Committee were brilliantly reimagined, set in a single, claustrophobic room, the paranoia and self-delusion tangible. But the most brilliant conceit of this extraordinary programme was to pitch Simon Schama, author of Citizens and defender of the humanist values of the Enlightenment, against the, shall we say, ‘provocative’ Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zjizek.

When the latter compared a revolution without terror to ‘beer without alcohol or coffee without caffeine’ Schama almost choked with anger and one was relieved that they were filmed separately. Hilary Mantel, author of an interesting novel about Robespierre, was among the other guests, but it was Schama, on terrific form, who stole the show. Having damned St Just as an adolescent who never grew up, he visibly delighted in the demise of Robespierre. The ‘seagreen incorruptible’ was shown with his jaw fractured by a musket wound being led half-dead to the guillotine. ‘I wish I had been there,’ said Schama, with a grin. It was superb television, excellent history, and utterly unmissable.