How TV's history men get it wrong

OUT of the schoolroom and on to the small screen: retreating from education, invading entertainment, history on TV is big business.

But is it good history? Or good television? To both questions, in most cases, the answer is squirmmakingly no.

Simon Schama returns to BBC2 at the end of this month with more instalments of his History of Britain. Meanwhile, David Starkey, capitalising on the good reception of Elizabeth I and The Six Wives of Henry VIII, has negotiated a pounds 2 million deal for a further series on Channel 4, making him the highest-paid performer on TV at pounds 75,000 per hour. A series on the British monarchy is expected soon.

Schama has put most bums on sofas, so his contribution ought to be exemplary. I used to read his books - daring essays, cutting-edge cultural history, lush narratives with academic integrity and popular appeal - in admiration of his genius. Now, I watch his work on television with dropped-jawed bewilderment. His ratings should make the publicists proud and the public ashamed.

He said that for television he would replace "authorised versions" of Britain's past with regionally refocused, globally conscious, culturally pluralist history. So far, he has not kept that promise. Instead, he offers heroes in Little England: high politics and high drama. Strings in Schama's Britain are pulled by individual puppeteers or torn in personality conflicts.

Vital dynamics disappear: the natural environment, impersonal forces and popular masses shrink or vanish.

His is an " island story": Churchillian history in demotic language. The rest of the world hardly gets mentioned, not even the essential European framework for under-

standing Britain's past and resolving her future. There is no regional sensitivity, but an unvariegated England. Scotland, Ireland and Wales feature mainly when enduring or resisting English conquest.

A candid, anglo-centric argument would have been interesting. The anglicisation of these islands is a thundering historical fact. Its limitations and failures are reshaping the United Kingdom today. But instead of confronting this story, Schama has dodged it.

Technically, the series bears marks of desperation. Instead of footage which visualises the past and evokes its feel, we get dim, unconvincing dramatisations; slow shots over static, feebly researched pictures; predictable, anachronistic music; contrived views of the presenter in unnamed, unexploited locations.

Schama fidgets as he delivers a script overburdened with words and narrative. He is one of our most brilliant

wordsmiths, but television is above all a picture-show and you can never exploit its potential to the full if you start with words.

Verbal pyrotechnics alternate with bog-standard professional screenwriting and embarrassing howlers: "Bang goes the gun - or, in this case, the sword."

Not even a presenter as powerful as Schama can impose his will on his team or his words on the script. Television is teamwork, and the presenter's independence has withered. Most telehistory is written by directors, who dumb it down and get it wrong. We shall never see again the days of the docu-pontiffs, when Kenneth Clark literally called the shots and Jacob Bronowski extemporised his script while the cameras rolled.

Or shall we? David Starkey has launched a fightback. He is a Fellow of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, with formidable research achievements and an established role -

rarely attained by British academics - as a public intellectual and a voice of the civilised Rightwing. He likes to learn from the teleprofessionals, he says, and enjoys shaping his shows collectively, but he patrols the programmes like a factual vigilante, keeping them close to the sources. While Schama gets the brickbats from the ivory tower, Starkey escapes academic sneers about vulgarisation. This indulgence is self-interested: telehistory helps to reverse the decline in student numbers.

Yet even Starkey is constrained.

He worries about sustaining his command as the scope of his programmes broadens beyond his expertise. To outflank directors' control over researchers he is launching a stunning innovation: his own research team, paid for by him and answerable to him, like a politician's think-tank. His concern for factual accuracy does not

translate into programmes without compromise, however: reconstructions with actors - rather than real evidence and real life - mar these programmes.

Both Schama and Starkey have failed to grasp the single most important point about history: that we live inside its rich detritus, and there is therefore no need for risible reconstructions, no excuse for irrelevant imagery. Furthermore, they have failed to question the received wisdom that television is best at telling stories and depicting characters. I am not so sure. I think television is best at displaying pictures and teasing feelings.

It is an evocative, suggestive, descriptive medium.

In the best programmes, the pictures are the plot. The screenwriter, who should also be the presenter, should "write to picture" - connecting the audience to the images, wresting perceptions, squeezing evidence from them, giving them a personal twist. The purpose is - or should be - to give viewers a vivid experience of the past and enhance our understanding of our present.

The past is the source of all our imaginations and the stimulus of all our minds.

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto is a Professorial Fellow of Queen Mary, University of London

Copyright 2002
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