Take us through the key themes of the final series
The great theme of modern British history is the fate of freedom. The 18th century inherits, after the Civil War, this very peculiar political animal. It’s not a democracy, but it’s not a tyranny. It’s not like the rest of the world, the rest of Europe. There is a parliament, laws have to be made, elections are made. And the issue is the two things that then happened to Britain. One is industrialisation; the first great roller-coaster powerhouse modern economy. Theme number two is the Empire itself.
What do those two things do to this, as it turns out, rather delicate apparatus of freedom? On the face of it you’d suppose that a modernising economy and running a quarter of the world would be good because it’s all about power; stick power next to freedom and it should be fine. But it isn’t. In both cases, there is a huge challenge. And the story we tell, the title of the book is ‘The Fate of Empire’, it’s really how we wrestle with those two problems. So the four great stories are all woven together. In the second series the great weaving is all about religious war.
The first programme is a dream, the dream of natural Britons. It’s a dream that somehow, even though we were becoming a modern economy, we can stay true to our natural selves. And poets become politicians in that process. It’s a dream that gets beaten up on a bit. The second is really about how families stay together in the Victorian period, and somehow the country avoids revolution. And at the end we have a Britain, oddly enough, in which there’s a sort of zero sum gain; the more empire you have, the harder those challenges become. At the very end when we lose our empire, is also the moment when we’re faced with saving our freedom in the Second World War. So it’s a very moving story and there are ‘sounds off’. The ‘sounds off’ are how did we stay a great power at the same time that we stay a free one?
Where do you end the series and why?
I thought we should definitely have an account of the experience of the 20th century and again, for me, the overwhelming rather poignant theme is the relationship between our imperial pretensions and our strong inheritance of both liberty and social justice. We need to have, still, a parliamentary democracy and we’ve always been committed to social compassion, all the way back to the Peasant’s Revolt, to the medieval traditions. So I wanted to embody all that, but I did not want to, it’s a personal thing, to do Mrs Thatcher and Tony Blair and so on. Because that (it’s just a personal thing, I’m sure it could be done) is too much like newspapers, is too much like Jeremy Paxman and so on, wonderful though all that is. That, to me, doesn’t have quite enough distance for the kind of epic sense of history.
So I needed to find two figures whose lives summed up the tension between freedom and empire. And we chose Orwell and Churchill as our kind of ‘two Ronnies’, two Winstons, and in fact we call the film that; Winston Smith and Winston Churchill. And I had the instinct that even though they seemed so impossibly different, that was part of their appeal; Orwell hating empire, Churchill obsessively absurdly committed to it. They were both profoundly patriotic.
There is something else too, which I wanted to make a big theme in the last programme - they were both obsessed with history itself. They both wrote history in their own ways and for both of them history wasn’t a museum, a kind of country house weekend, nice as those are, but something that had flesh and blood to it. So it seemed to me absolutely right that the interweave of their lives spoke volumes about the 20th century. That meant that you had to finish in 1955. You had to finish with Churchill’s funeral, we actually start the last programme with Churchill’s funeral. So that is our end point.
What leaves me, inevitably one always has troubled second thoughts, the cliché about Churchill’s funeral, even when as, I remember witnessing it, I was 20 years old, was that it was, quote, “an end of an era”. My worry is that people will say well they stopped because that’s when you could really honestly embrace British history, we stopped fooling ourselves that we were great at the point at which his body was lowered in the coffin at Bladon’s churchyard. I don’t actually think that’s true. I think really both Churchill and Orwell’s lives had this extraordinary after-echo. But there’s nothing more difficult and anti-climactic than some sort of postscript. So I’m hoping that what we say in that last programme has a natural resonance out into our own lives.
How do you approach translating History into television?
The approach we took was indeed one of storytelling, but, in an odd way, for a long time, in the way of written history, I’ve been getting more and more averse to the kind of approach which billboards, you know - introduction, conclusion, buggins, juggins and muggings, give an argument A and I will confound them all by giving argument B. I always thought the stories themselves could deliver the questions. So we weren’t ever just storytelling.
We always decided, no matter how storytelling-like the films were, the programmes were, there was always a very big, often rather dauntingly scholarly question at the back of them, but we wanted to deliver that question gently and if we could, enchantingly. We wanted to sort of seduce people into paying attention.
The Elizabeth film, for example, looks like, as it is, a kind of catfight between two impossible women; Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots. Behind that issue is an enormous question about women and power in the 16th century and how they used their bodies, hence the title of that programme ‘The Queen’s Body’. And a great deal of brilliant feminist scholarship has said here are the choices; the queen is simply a receptacle, a piece of biology designed to produce the next heir, or does that piece of biology, when it has a huge brain on it, make a different choice? But we needed to deliver that as story.
Now having said that, and not to be too long-winded, all of us have wrestled with is that within a single programme, where do you spell out the questions, where do you stop the storyline, so that people don’t think they’re in a kind of costume drama made by Hollywood? Maybe they want that. And that’s a matter of pace and delicacy, and if you have pure story it’s just going to be froth, but if it’s pure question, people are going to switch to ‘Match of the Day’ or whatever. That is a real toughie, it’s a toughie when you’re writing too, but it’s a mega toughie in television. That was always our greatest challenge.
How did you confront a series of such magnitude?
It’s been an extraordinary experience really. I’d done quite a lot of television; there was a modest series based on landscape and memory and I’d done films on Rembrandt and quite a lot. But I said to myself and to the people who approached me in the BBC that if I was going to do this, and I took a long time deciding whether it was going to be a good idea, for the BBC and for me, I wanted to really dive into it and I wanted to be part of how we chose locations, how we chose stories, how we decided what had to be dropped, what the great questions were. And then really I wanted to write it, all the…constantly with images in my mind, landscapes, architecture, pictures. My thing has always been images, that historical documents aren’t just writing.
So that meant really doing screen plays pretty much and that’s a very exacting discipline, it’s a tough thing to learn and I wasn’t always good at it and I often wrote too many words. It’s been an extraordinary labour of love, a communal task. As a writer you’re essentially both free and very solitary and very self-indulgent. Television won’t work, especially this kind of television, unless there’s a lot of mutual respect among the different people for their different kinds of work. Everybody, I think, from saintly camera men to assistant producers to editors, have been very hospitable, providing one took the trouble to learn one’s trade and that was incredibly exhausting but very thrilling.
It’s always said, you know I’m 57, at my time of life you either get a new wife or a new job, I happen to love my partner so I got a new job instead.
In what ways do interactive media support the series?
One of the great things about the Internet for our series is that it’s not a kind of closed opportunity. I never wanted to be a kind of authority who would pontificate. Like all of you out there, I was learning as I was going along, which made me a fraud from the beginning for many of my senior colleagues! I wanted to convey the sense of the excitement of learning. I was a student as much as a, kind of, big mouth.
I was always against ‘tilt shots’, where the camera crouches at your feet and sticks itself up your face because it wants to have Rouen Cathedral coming out the back of your head, and I said “no, no, no, because this always gives the impression that you’re talking down to people, you look as though you’re literally lofty’ and I said “no, no, no, I’m part of all those learners out there”.
So on our website, on the live chats shows, people can come back, can contradict my arrogantly biased opinions and it can be an open discussion. That’s one of the pleasures of it I hope.
Is the internet a positive force for History?
The internet is potentially an extraordinary, not to say explosively positive, force, I think. But you’re talking to the wrong person, possibly, because I again was very lucky, I was trained as an historian, a word I actually kind of hate, by people in the 60s who came out of National Service and were, what I would call, ‘journeymen democrats’. They were not people who came through public schools into Oxbridge. Because they came late to academia, they always needed, like, to earn a living from journalism. So their instinct and this precious thing which they passed on to us was to be an historian was to be part of an enormous community, not just professors or dons, but librarians, archivists, family historians, re-enactors, custodians of historic sites. All these were really part of an enormous world of loving the past and seeing its value for the present. It goes all the way back to Herodotus, to the Greeks, to people who felt history was a kind of civic performance, without which we were time morons. This is a very moving gift.
So weirdly enough, the internet has the potential of reconstituting that very various community. The dangers are overload, incoherence, therefore it’s incumbent in a way, for us working stiffs, not to say we won’t have anything to do with this, but actually play an even stronger editorial role. There is a danger of spurious documents – the internet is a very promiscuous place – you don’t have the controls that archivists give you on what is fake, literally fake and what is spurious. Often there’s no sense of hierarchy of importance – it’s true of junk mail that you don’t want. So if the internet works it needs a kind of face-to-face human presence as well. And I’d say the toughest challenge is to recreate the physical immediacy of letters and objects which become virtual electronic objects and that has a potential flattening level – electronic flattening, which could be a shame.
How important is it to get close to historical sources?
Anyone who has worked in an archive knows there is almost a kind of physical excitement about turning over a letter, looking at the handwriting, it almost re-enacts the person doing the writing itself. There’s something sad about the invention of the typewriter and all that stops!
I felt this and wanted to communicate it, and again, through electronic means you can bring people very close to, for example, the Paston letters, which were the first private correspondence to have survived in the archive. They are letters written between the members of a family that found itself caught up in the War of the Roses. The mix of private life and big public events is fantastically important in making history immediate and present and proximate, sometimes uncomfortably so. So that’s something that is really important.
I would say though that something else we can do on the web, and have tried to do, is that other than letters, images, paintings, pieces of architecture (through our photo gallery) we can make people reflect a little on how those too bare the imprint of past experience.
What inspired you to become a historian?
I was supposed to be a lawyer, not a lumberjack, a lawyer. A lawyer in the kind of world I grew up in was defined as a Jewish boy who can’t stand the sight of blood, because the only choices were a doctor or a lawyer. Actually, when I was growing up as a little Jewish boy in Britain, in the 40s and 50s, the Old Testament seemed to be the most exciting history book. All the bits that people find boring - Og, king of Bash and Smites, Zog, king of Gilliad – I loved all that stuff, great people rending each others’ entrails in the name of Jehovah – wonderful, really ripping yarns.
And weirdly there’s this tradition in Jewish culture called Zahore, which means memory – which is very obvious on Passover night, where somehow you are the sum of the books of your past, and I’m sure that had a lot to do with it, that there seemed to be this ability to travel an extraordinary bridge across time.
And I also think, this is the more important thing, that at route, the Western tradition of history, again from Herodotus onwards, it’s about tolerance actually, not to say there hasn’t been a lot of intolerance in history. But you can’t do history unless you put yourself in someone else’s shoes. When Herodotus wrote the history of the Greeks in the ‘Wars with the Persians’, he couldn’t just do it as us against them, without understanding them. And he was a traveller, literally from the Ionian Islands, not from Athens, so he moved around the world and knew he had to inhabit people who were different from him in time and space, and the beauty and the moral power of history, is that it makes you inhabit people who are not you in time and space.
Tell us about your heroes and villains.
There is a very obvious hero for me, and it’s impossible not to be slightly absurdly in love with Elizabeth I. You want to say that you’re averse to all this drooling sycophantic ga ga prostration before the great Virgin Queen and then you find yourself hopelessly starry eyed all over again. She was a hell of a woman.
And there are other obvious figures. Intolerably idiotic about the empire though he was, you can’t help but be moved by the grandeur of Churchill’s obstinacy in 1940. I wouldn’t be alive, I’m convinced of that, there wouldn’t be any English Jews without him.
But then there are small people as well who I’m very fond of. William Hazlitt, who actually doesn’t appear in the series, but who did at one point! He worships the lake poet, Wordsworth, when Wordsworth is a radical, and is furious with Wordsworth for becoming a conservative. He appears a lot in the book. He is the greatest essayist, even greater than Orwell I think, in the whole of the English language. So if no-one has heard of Hazlitt – find him – the first great writer on boxing, the first great sports writer, theatre writer, devastating on politics, a truly great figure.
I’m very moved by Olaudah Equinano, which is a bit correct, but why not be correct when it’s the truth? He provides the first account of the appalling trauma of being taken as a child from a village in Africa and being turned into a slave. He was bought by an English sailor, a naval officer, and was made his personal servant. So he learns English from the Bible and travels with this officer and is devoted to him and thinks this officer, in effect, makes him into a free Briton, and then of course is sold at the end of it – a devastating moment. The narrative is very powerful, very unsentimental, extremely moving, and we talk about him a bit in programme 11. He’s a kind of heroic figure.
John Milton who briefly appears in his gloomy cussedness, is, you can’t help but be moved by his life as well as his poetry. It’s Milton who gives us the first sense that the people have the right to change their government rather than be always told what the government will be by those who are richer and who have grander blood pedigrees than they. So they are some, certainly I guess my slightly pinko-leftie, what a surprise, heroes.
Villains, well, you want to kind of look for unusual villains, but when you, for example, come nose-to-nose with someone like King John, you think, he can’t be that bad, that he was very clever, deeply misunderstood and you want to say that there is definitely a revisionist case for King John. There isn’t! He was an awful horrible squalid paranoid psychotic. Everyone got him perfectly right, even Walt Disney in the animated version of Robin Hood, got John absolutely spot-on. He really was not good news.
Edward I, a great hero as we were growing up, was truly horrible, again you want to say 'Brave Heart, load of rubbish, Mel Gibson, dream on…' Edward I truly scary figure, completely prepared to trample on anyone’s face, just as long as they could lie down and say, 'Oh thou new emperor of England, please accept us in the great embrace of greater England' ...yuk!