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BBC HISTORY LECTURE: SIMON SCHAMA
Saturday 7 December 9.05pm-10.15pm
Two extracts from the inaugural BBC History Lecture, delivered by Simon Schama on 29 May 2002.
Television and the trouble with history
Schama on 'Soap opera' history
'It has also been said, and lazily repeated by both academic and journalist critics, that the series [A History of Britain] has been 'all kings and queens' - in which case they must have been looking at some other series. We make no apology for medieval programmes that concentrated, for example, on the nature of kingship and the constraints on its authority…even in medieval programmes where monarchs were indisputably history-makers, we endeavoured to put the kings, as it were, in their historical place.
They have also criticised us for being over-preoccupied with the royal divorce and the relationship between Henry and Anne Boleyn. What, in the scholarly world passes as thoughtful revision, becomes, when turned into television, 'soap opera'.
Underlying many of these complaints is a deep-rooted prejudice against the possibility of serious television history, given that the subject is held to be too important to be left to bungling (as it is implied) 'amateurs'. 'Real' history is, apparently, the monopoly of the academy.
Whenever something like this is said, it reminds me of the great medievalist Oxford professor, Bishop Stubbs who, in his inaugural lecture, warned that it would be a waste of time and effort, perhaps a dangerous waste of time and effort, to teach history in the schools. He was, of course, thinking only of boys' schools. Girls, it is safe to say, seldom entered the episcopal-pedagogic mind.
For Stubbs and his generation, the integrity of historical scholarship was conditional on its separation from the contamination of the vulgar world. So the walls and archives were to be raised in its colleges, behind which the priesthood could pursue their disinterested research far from the clamour.
Now those walls have been overthrown and television history especially - I'm proud to say, - has been part of the demolition squad.
Can television get serious?
If you accept the premise that in a time of danger history needs to capture memory (before the bad guys hold it hostage); can television, must television ride to the rescue?
Should it set its sights higher than low-budget costume shows, nostalgia-fixes, tonics for the patriotically insecure who want to pull the covers over their heads and be sent to sleep by Tudor lullabies and wake up perhaps with a strange urge, if not to go around executing enemies, then at least issuing Parliamentary Acts in Restraint of the Euro: 'England is an empire, entire of itself'?
Now that it does seem to have a mass audience, can television history get serious without breaking the spell?
The answer from some (not all) quarters of the academy has been 'of course not'; because of all the reasons I listed at the beginning. The verdict is based on four inter-connected assumptions all of which you'll be happy to hear, are mistakes.
The first is that real history is essentially coterminous with the printed book; the second is that only printed text is capable of carrying serious argument, compared to which images, still or moving, are necessarily weak carriers of meaning and debate, essentially auxiliary and this expendably frivolous illustration.
Thirdly; that, for all the flirtation of scholars with writing for popular readership, history remains shaped by full-time professionals, hewers at the rock-face of the archives who alone have the esoteric knowledge (the 'training' as academia likes to say) to define both the terms of the debates and just who is allowed to join them.
Consequently, and finally, the success of television history is judged (just take a look at academic written reviews of A History of Britain in History Today for example) by the degree to which the preoccupations of print historians; are faithfully translated and reproduced on television.
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