A History of Britain: A Response

American Historical Review, June 2009

If I confess to some astonishment at writing this response, it is only because I am even more astonished – and moved – that the American Historical Review judged a fifteen-part television series worthy of sustained critical consideration in the pages of an AHR Forum. I would be churlish not to preface my comments by first thanking all three commentators for the intellectual generosity with which they approached their subject, and for the marked absence of condescension towards a project which, had they tackled it themselves, they would, I believe, have discovered to be every bit as exacting as any more conventionally scholarly project.

It is eleven years since I started work on A History of Britain, nine years since the first film shoot in Orkney, and six years since the last episodes were broadcast on terrestrial channels in Britain and the United States. (Although, gratifyingly, the series has had a continuing life on cable broadcasts and on DVDs, both as an educational tool and as popular entertainment.) So looking back on the enterprise from this distance is, for me at any rate, something of an exercise in cultural history itself. But it is also an opportunity to reflect on the part that the television documentary plays in diffusing historical knowledge; provoking debate and enriching the common culture with a sensibility informed by the past could not be more timely. For the scholarly community is surely at a crossroads in considering the forms by which history is communicated within and beyond the academy. The digital moment is no less pregnant with consequences for the survival of the interpreted past than was the transition from oral to written word in antiquity, and from written to print culture in the Renaissance. Whether we like it or not (and I have my own load of mixed feelings), we are unquestionably at the beginning of the end of the long life of the paper-and-print history book. The exigencies of economic austerity are likely to only hasten a process that is already under way. Print books will of course survive their eventual demise in the marketplace of knowledge, and monographs custom-printed from digital sources will doubtless endure as physical objects, perhaps even on library shelves. But in shorter order than the profession has yet taken in, most history will be consumed, especially beyond the academy, in digital forms: on interactive websites; as uploadable films; from electronic museum sites, archives and libraries – a prospect towards which most university scholars seem (at best) cool, and to which we are taking precious few steps to acclimatise future generations of historians.

While I was working on A History of Britain, moved by the possibility of passing on some insight to students about the ways in which scholarly history might be popularised for much broader audiences without compromising its integrity, I was rash enough to propose an optional graduate seminar called ‘History beyond the Academy’. I thought I might actually offer instruction on script-writing, on developing treatments and budgets for a variety of hypothetical projects: radio documentaries, digital textbooks, interactive public exhibitions, children’s books, films. Further, I imagined that along with disciplined practical instruction about these skills, such a class would debate the long and complicated history of the relationship between scholarly and popular writing. I have always tried to preach what I have practised: that the two lives of a historian, within and without the academy, are mutually sustaining, each necessary for the other to flourish, and that without their interdependence we are doomed to an intellectual half-life, cut off from the nourishment of, and responsibility to tend the curiosity of, the non-academic world. The proposal was greeted in some quarters with polite dismay as an act of pedagogical subversion. ‘Do you want to create second-class citizens among the students?’ was one rhetorical question put to me by way of dissuasion. (For the record, I persisted and, some years later, though only once, taught the course as planned.)

It was from this conviction that our calling not only invites us but requires us to reach beyond the academy that I undertook, with great trepidation – and exhilaration – A History of Britain. Although it is sometimes referred to as ‘The BBC History of Britain’, my cautionary resort to the indefinite article was of course not casual. Whatever the outcome of the series, my role as narrator and interpreter presupposed the provisional, candidly subjective character of the project. I have never pretended otherwise. In fact, it was, I confess, a slight impatience with the assumption (in, for example, Ken Burns’s documentaries) that a multiplicity of voices somehow guarantees balance or authentically interpretative pluralism that provoked me, perhaps perversely, to raise the hermeneutic stakes by offering one historian’s vision. As all the commentators have pointed out, there were many inherent dangers in the approach, not least narrative arrogance. But I deliberately set out to challenge what seemed to me the unexamined assumptions of pseudo-balance presupposed by the choir of talking heads approach.

It doesn’t require much knowledge about film-making to realise that the impression of openness given by replacing a single voice with a quartet or more is, in fact, just that. Unless one of those voices supplies the script (at which point pluralism ceases), the director selects those whom he or she chooses to be heard. What is said, how much of a voiced comment is heard, and where it gets cut into the body of the film is invariably an auxiliary of the directorially written script, and its effect is conditioned by its relation to the visual archive. In these documentaries the single director is the historian, whatever the captions may say. And the edit is the final draft. The scripts for A History of Britain, on the other hand, were entirely mine. There was no ‘vast team of researchers’, just a single junior colleague per film, usually the assistant producer, who also had to deal with locations, fixers and the usual production multi-tasking that makes documentaries possible. So, for better or worse, almost all of the research work that went into those scripts was my own. The determination of locations was likewise a collegial process, with discussions about how this or that site might work with evidence and storyline. If not on a shoot, I was part of the editing process by which the ‘pieces to camera’ were integrated with archival evidence, attending screenings of the cut through its many stages or making edit suggestions long-distance. I worked with the composer John Harle and directors on the score, and in some cases on the dub itself. For critics who think I had already arrogated too much authority to my narration, I suppose this hands-on integration into the production compounds the sin. But faced with the choice between, on the one hand, a role that restricted me to on-camera opinions, with the creative history really being made by directors and editors, and, on the other hand, the possibility of more total immersion, I had no doubt which approach would be more satisfying and, for the audience, more honest.

A History of Britain was never purely monovocal. But instead of cutting to colleagues, the films were thickly seeded with contemporary voices, from Orderic Vitalis to George Orwell, sometimes deliberately offering competing versions of the same event. And when dispute was material to the historical matter – for example, in Oliver Cromwell’s treatment of Irish prisoners of war and civilians – I did my best to present both sides of the argument, without, however, disingenuously abdicating my role as arbitrator of evidence, the same persona that we all habitually adopt in our writing. What I did not want was for the films to turn into seminars, for those are two incommensurately distinct forms of communication. (For that matter, just how genuinely open the professorially led seminar ever is to a democratic plurality of opinion is quite a question, as Pierre Bourdieu has reminded us.) But given that my task was to try and create a broad popular audience for the narrative of British history, and to hold it week after week, my choice was to eschew an echo chamber of authorities in favour of a companionship in which the narrator took viewers along with him on a journey of shared illumination. When the opinionated voice provoked, the provocation was, I hope, always candid, stirring debate, counter-argument and dissent, often robustly expressed on the website, which was itself richly supplied with both general and scholarly essays, many of which took healthy exception to my own version.

In this kind of project, story must come first, the handmaid and condition of analytical debate, not the other way about. This is no more than to follow the obvious rule set out by the historians of antiquity, and it corresponds to the most rudimentary phenomenological understanding of the way non-scholars order the experience of time. Re-presenting (with all the knotty issues of evidence retained) is one of the most complex and demanding tasks that historians can set themselves, even though professional scholars, wary of narrative theory, sometimes imagine it to be the amateur version of the discipline. Story is the thread that connects our scholarly work with the listening, reading public, and we break it at our peril. To weave those threads into a rich fabric, the executive producers (Janice Hadlow and Martin Davidson, both thoughtful historians in their own right) and I believed that a single unapologetically opinionated writing and speaking voice could create and retain a mass audience, the breadth of which was commonly said at that time to be unavailable to television history. Many commentators cite the great example of Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation as a model, to which I would also add the more inspirational example of Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man, and Alistair Cooke’s stunning tour de force America: A Personal History of the United States. But at the time of the planning of a television history of Britain, that tradition of personal essay had all but died out. This was not entirely the case, since writer-presenters such as Michael Wood remained a model of what could be done in this medium, but it was still largely true that the interpretative single-voice form had been written off as a vestigial remnant of oak-panelled patrician broadcasting. Democratic television, on the other hand, was assumed to be fly-on-the-wall actuality: a day in the police station, the trauma room or the schoolroom in the deadpan style of Fred Wiseman, and often very brilliantly realised for television by directors such as Roger Graeff.

But at the very heart of the kingdom of fly-on-the-wall, there were subversives – Michael Jackson, then controller of BBC2, and Janice Hadlow, then in charge of one of the two history divisions of the BBC – who nourished a suspicion that if you stood the received wisdoms on their head, you might be closer to the truth. Their belief, widely dismissed at the time as quixotic, was that there was a pent-up public demand for a single-voiced, chronologically ordered history on the grand scale, richly informed by social and cultural history but unapologetically évènementielle, when the events in question happened to be of the order of magnitude of the Norman Conquest, the dissolution of the monasteries, the Civil War, the Industrial Revolution, the Irish famine, and so on. And not just on television, but in schools around Britain, where history was being rationed to perhaps two hours a week at best, and where the curriculum was set out as a series of disconnected modules known as ‘Hitler and the Henries’, the non-academic public was being starved of just such a grand narrative.

I never intended the series to be empty of social history, still less of the experience of ‘the people’, as Miri Rubin and to some extent Linda Levy Peck charge. Nor was it. But television is a work of the eye, and the life of the people necessarily had to be embodied in what could be looked at: dwellings and artefacts – the tiny, profoundly poignant Saxon church at Bradwell; the surviving remnant of a lost Catholic world in the rood-screen paintings at Binham Priory; the shocking photographs of the Indian famines of the late nineteenth century taken by missionaries; and, as Peck kindly mentions, the unspeakably moving tokens left by mothers depositing their infants at the Foundling Hospital. The very first images seen (other than the tidal shore) were of the village of Skara Brae and the hearth and ornaments made in that world remote both spatially and temporally from the Anglocentric world. And if, at the end of the film, the camera moved in on the exquisite ‘Alfred Jewel’ in the Ashmolean, it was both as a materialisation of royal sovereignty and to convey a sense of the precarious allegiance to that earliest of English courts on the part of those who beheld it. We took viewers into a fifteenth-century manor house, the deserted cottages of Irish famine victims, the fields of Bengali cultivators, the homeless shelters of London in the Slump. Equally, where the voices of people remote from the centre of power were available and integral to the bigger plot, we did our best to make them heard: from the world of the Roman legionaries on the Hadrianic frontier preserved in the Vindolanda tablets, to the anonymous Irish monk who believed he might be the last survivor of the Black Death, to Leveller women and the victims of Peterloo.

So what, exactly, needs defending here? The decision to fill the second episode with the story of the Norman Conquest, or the third with the struggle between Church and state in the reigns of the Angevins? If so, I readily plead guilty as charged. Professor Rubin wanted a much more intensive dose of social history and a good deal less narrative of the powerful, but of course at the heart of many of the formative dramas were insurrections against the mighty – from the Peasants’ Revolt to the Puritan revolution to Chartism – that we could hardly have been more conscientious in examining. But it is true that our remit was to put social flesh on the history of power, for contests over power were what ultimately created Britain.

In the end, though, ostensible dichotomies between narrative and analysis, between political and social history, exist more in the methodological imagination than in historical practice. Film-making is the best instructor in the meaninglessness of that divide. Meeting the technical demands of a medium where it is imperative that one assumes no prior knowledge of a subject or period, while refraining from patronising the viewing audience, is itself a serious education in the economy of explanation. In any given programme, there would be self-evidently major issues – Cromwell’s treatment of the Irish, Jacobitism, the Sepoy rebellion – all of which, if the historian is doing his work properly, presuppose familiarising the audience with the responsible protagonists, their ideologies and actions – before it is possible to introduce debate. All this takes time, narrative care and a respect for the intrinsic dramaturgy of the medium. Films are not consumed like books and cannot be written like them. (Which is why I wrote three companion volumes, precisely to expand the scope of what I was able to compass in a bare fifty-eight minutes.) Within the covers of a book, readers may move back and forth as attention and interest prompt. In the television documentary, propulsive visual and spoken energy is critical. In these respects, the medium is actually something of a throwback to pre-professional forms of historical narration, all the way from Herodotus, the crafting of narrative that performs out its analysis rather than headlines it. It must use scholarship responsibly without ever subjecting the audience to a sense of their being examined or overburdened with scholarly dispute, yet it must speak to that audience’s trust that the narrator has earned his credibility with knowledge.

So there is, in fact, a poetics of television history, which needs to be respected if the form is to accomplish its own particular kind of communication – for millions rather than thousands. Such a poetics presupposes a strictly non-fiction dramaturgy, bound together by a clear and compelling narrative arc, and its making is quite as formidable a challenge as, say, the formal composition of post-Ciceronian oratory. Documentaries never work as a succession of loosely stitched-together sequences about this and that matter, social or political, each given their ration of minutes according to some preconceived hierarchy of significance. The distinction is the difference between even the most skilled lecture and a film able to retain its audience from beginning to end (a tougher assignment on television than in the cinema, given the freedom to wander between choices). Profusion risks confusion, and confusion is the harbinger of boredom, which in turn is the cue for a switch to Monday-night football. Peter Stansky remembers the scintillating lectures delivered by A. J. P. Taylor as television performances, but those happened more than forty years ago, in a different cultural universe. Since then, the challenge to deliver knowledge, argument and non-fiction stories through the digital media has become much more formidable, and if historians want to reach an audience beyond the academy (of course it’s possible that the vast majority do not), then some attention has to be paid to the particular demands – and rich opportunities – offered by long-form documentary film and video.

One historian’s inclusiveness is another’s unforgivable omission, of course, but in any event, the pursuit of inclusiveness is the death of plot. To take a specific instance of what Professor Rubin surprisingly dismisses as the ‘antics of kings’, the foregrounding of the great conflict over law, and the relative authority of Church and Crown which was at the heart of the matter in the Henry II–Becket dispute, needed setting up (as did the history that would culminate in Hastings and Domesday) so that viewers, the vast majority of whom would not have known much about the Angevins, could become familiar with the parties and persons involved. And of course there are occasions when the fate of not just the state but the people hangs on the person of the prince. I own up to believing – as forthrightly stated – that however prepared by religious dissent since the Lollards, in the end the English break from Rome was an act of the redefinition of sovereignty executed by a monarch desperate for a male heir. It seems peculiar to have to defend this view as antiquated. All that matters is whether it is true. That Anne Boleyn also happened to be a learned Protestant is material to this issue, and I tried to say as much. But the notion that that programme paid no attention to the experience of the world beyond the court is an inattentive reading of the film, and I appreciate Professor Peck’s alternative view. Equally, of course, the issue of issue for Elizabeth I was one that would affect the entire fate of English religion. What we were doing with ‘The Body of the Queen’ was, as is often the case in the whole series, ‘debate by stealth’, in this case applying the questions set out in Ernst Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies about the distinction between the body natural and the body political (made moot in the Queen’s case), as well as much more recent literature on gender and sovereignty, to the fatefully intertwined story of Elizabeth and Mary Stuart. Those who wanted to experience the film as an engagement with the politics of gender, the reproductive biology of sovereignty as it played out across the Anglo-Scottish border, could do so; those who wanted to sit back and drink in an astounding dynastic drama could do that, too. I don’t see any need to apologise for our attention to the second kind of demand. Both kinds of audience were entitled to their respective needs, and we tried our level best to satisfy them without compromising scholarship or debate.

All this took hard work. I confess to being a little surprised that in her account of the meetings with BBC producers during an earlier version of the project, Professor Rubin rather airily divided up the labour into what she imagined historians would, or rather would not, do, and what ‘the production team’ would tackle, the more strenuous labour, she implies, being undertaken by the latter. But for this historian, at any rate, both the magnitude of the challenge and the satisfaction of creation rested in that division of labour being made moot, in the historian doing his best to master the exacting craft of television film. This means, at the bare minimum, relearning script-writing as an entirely different exercise from book-writing, one that not only has to be constantly responsive to what the viewer is looking at, but has to be conceived, from the outset, as a series of visual sequences, each one itself a succession of shots, understanding, in fact, the syntax of the cut. (I am personally allergic to the meaningless dissolve except in instances where it dramatises the memory link between past and present. In one of the episodes in my most recent series, The American Future: A History, for example, we mixed through from a shot of a stony creek on the Gettysburg battlefield to a Civil War photograph of the same site with a dead soldier lying in the gulley.)

I don’t altogether disagree with Peter Stansky’s objections to the clumsiness of poorly enacted reconstructions. Done badly, they can induce cringe-making alienation from the historical moment rather than realise the ambition of bringing the viewer close to it. But sometimes a kind of film synecdoche or emblematics can work powerfully on the viewing imagination, especially when both approaches have a connection with the documentary and cultural report. So, for example, a shot of a single bonnet bowling along a field in the aftermath of Peterloo worked, I believe, quite well in summoning the ghosts of the massacre, since contemporary reports commented on the clothes of the victims left behind in the panic. Instead of a wide shot of the Cabinet War Rooms (very much a museum of a moment), we used shots of apparently incidental details – a row of coat hooks, an ashtray – to convey the whole.

And when rooted in a strong sense of the iconology of the period, emblematics can visualise a historical scene far more expressively than either a shot of a document or a low-budget piece of acting. To convey the fury of Henry II at the defiance of Becket, for example, we used close-up shots of a hawk’s beak opening and shutting (to the rhythm of unseen proffered mice), an image entirely in keeping with the spirit of royal bestiaries and the falconry of which the King was fond. We used the same kind of technique with a white peacock’s display to suggest the significance of charisma for the Elizabethan court, making the kind of connections between plumage, virginal whiteness, the elaborate ruffs of court dress and the grandiose paintings that captured them, all in a single shot. And sometimes less is simply more. To convey the plight of the fugitive Mary Stuart from Scotland, we took up position at exactly the right place, near Workington on the Cumbrian side of the Solway Firth, where the Derwent flows into the sea. But there was no boat and no fake Queen of Scots. All the camera did was to track slowly along the shore, shooting the slow lap of the waves while the commentary evoked the documented record of her sorry condition. The eyes of the viewer saw tidal water, but their mind’s eye saw the Queen.

I can’t emphasise enough that these aren’t ‘tricks’ designed to bewitch the viewer into historical romance. The royal hunt, the reality of exile and the relationship between power and display are all serious historical matters on which matters of sovereignty turned. The same sort of attentiveness inspired the idea of illustrating, albeit briefly, the effects of the Black Death with emptiness and absence, unattended farm implements, or the Popish Plot with the playing cards that were circulating at the time. In many instances, the careful building of the visual and narrative structure of a film turned on the realisation of a unifying conceit. The last programme in the series had somehow to give a sense of the fate of the British Empire from the turn of the twentieth century to the Second World War, a feat of economy that would have been impossible had we tracked conscientiously through from the Liberal governments of Edwardian Britain to the Labour victory of 1945 and everything in between. Instead I decided to concentrate on what two utterly different figures made of the destiny of Britain in the age of economic disaster and totalitarian aggression: Churchill and Orwell, to begin with Churchill’s death and to end with Orwell’s. But as the fifteenth programme in a long, sustained narrative also had to serve as coda, the director, Clare Beavan, and I decided that the style would give the feeling of Mass Observation documentary, black and white even when it was actually not. And the mood would be an engagement with elegy, a deep strain in British writing, prose and verse, and the binding conceit would be the lament for, or resistance to, ruin.

Sometimes serendipity is the best ally. I had been filming a sequence (in the end dropped from the edit) for the late-eighteenth-century episode at the Royal Naval Dockyards at Chatham. Between shots of masts and spars, during the inevitable waits for the location to be lit, I wandered into a warehouse-cum-dry-dock that was, in fact, half-breakers’ yard, half-repository of rubbish, inhabited mostly by pigeons and piled high with the debris of centuries: cannonballs; a motor launch broken in two; a 1940s vintage limousine covered with feathers and bird droppings; bits of submarine. Seen from a high platform above, it was a wonderland of imperial redundancy. And it gave us both a sequence near the beginning of ‘The Two Winstons’ and our poetic motif. Off we went, the director and I, hunting for abandoned and boarded-up country houses and, most challengingly, an airfield of the right Second World War vintage that had not been converted for more modern use. After a very long search, we found one in Norfolk, complete with original control tower and broken windows, Tannoy speakers, and long grass growing in the cracks opened in the runways. Eureka! For the defiant Churchill speeches of 1940 at the time of the Battle of Britain, we needed neither the much-viewed archive footage of the Prime Minister nor photo stills of the ‘Few’ by the side of their Spitfires, much less a Winston impersonator in a dubious homburg. All we needed were yawning-wide shots of that airfield, open and desolate to the flat country, and the superlative vox humana of Churchill sounding over the East Anglian wind. What we were fighting against, of course, was familiarity. Running the film archive would simply have made that problem worse, because it would have subconsciously cued up the imminence of the eventual victorious outcome. What Clare Beavan and I wanted to restore was a sense of the terrifying loneliness of the British at that moment. Ghostly emptiness was the way to do that, with not so much as the faintest sound of cranking aircraft engines to cut the admixture of bravery and fear. Behind the sequence, of course, was the usual serious historical issue: the yen by Halifax and others to find a way to settle with the Axis without compromising the empire. Pulling the viewer into a mood that had nothing of the bulldog breed about it would, we hoped, restore contingency to the history.

Now, I recognise that this account may seem a long way from what most of the readers of the American Historical Review recognise as the work of the historian. Our first duties are to nourish our academic community and our research, to ensure that future generations of historical scholars are sustained and encouraged and that new paths of research and debate are opened. Courses have to be taught, dissertations examined, articles and books written, appointments made. In making the fifteen episodes of A History of Britain for the BBC, I had to ask for exceptional generosity of leave from my kind colleagues at Columbia University, although between the three spells of shoots, I returned to campus as working professor. But the main obstacle to broadening our conception of what it means to be a historian in the digital age is, I think, force of habit, the axiomatically self-reproducing nature of the profession – the sense that, somehow, popular and scholarly history are mutually depleting. I can only say that everything I did and everything I learned while making these films led me to believe that the very opposite is true: that the two arms of our métier are mutually strengthening, and that without an abiding sense that we can work to make the past live for the public, we will doom ourselves to an intellectual graveyard: that of the connoisseurship of the dead.