The Books of My Life: History and the Media

 

Ever since the advent of historical documentaries on television, something that arguably began in Great Britain with the BBC’s 26 part documentary on World War I titled The Great War in 1964, professional historians have debated the quality of television history. For at least some academic historians, television histories, be they the lecture style, the presenter style, or the you are there form of television history, have a number of inherent problems. They are, some maintain, too image oriented. They are too selective. They make too much use of “historical” reconstructions. They simplify historical, theoretical, and methodological complexities way too much often in the service of seeking a wider audience, something that is always pressing when it comes to television including public television particularly these days. They too often focus on wars.

The fact of the matter, however, is that many television histories are done with the assistance of professional historians, as was the case with The Great War and many others since, and some have even been presented by academic historians themselves, though this hasn’t resulted in a diminishment in the number of those criticising the genre for its supposed simplification and in some cases, perversion of history. Given this it should not be a surprise that not all professional, let alone amateur historians, agree with the negative assessment of television history, something the papers contained in David Cannadine’s edited collection History and the Media (Houndsmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England: Palgrave, 2004), a collection of papers presented at a conference on the media and history in London along with a couple of essays reproduced from magazines, point up. For many of the contributors to this collection television history is not inherently ahistorical or anti-historical. For many of these commentators television history is no more or less selective and manipulated than traditional history with its emphasis on the written word. For them the quality of history depends not on whether histories are in written form or not, but on the quality of the history including the television history.

The contributions to History and the Media can be divided thematically into several utlimately ideal types. There are the essays by television insiders which explore the history of television history such as those by Taylor Downing and Roger Smither who tries to the answer to the question as to why so many television histories have focused on war. There are the essays by professional historians like Simon Schama and Ian Kershaw, the two essays that were originally published in magazines, which explore the problems of television histories while offering defences of the BBC television histories they presented, A History of Britain in Schama’s case, or worked on, The Nazis: A Warning from History in Kershaw’s case. There are the essays by those amateur historians responsible for noted television histories of the past including that of Jeremy Isaacs, one of those responsible for what some consider the zenith of television history (me included), the 26 part The World at War a television history of World War II commissioned by ITV and broadcast in 1973, and that of Melvin Bragg, who reflects on his role in the making of and presenting of The Adventure of English from 2003 for the BBC. There is the essay by Max Hastings which raises questions about the genre of television history itself while simultaneously ruminating on the cultural reasons for why so many academics envy those professionals and amateurs who make television histories. There are the somewhat tangential essays by Jean Seaton on approaches to the history of broadcasting, David Puttnam on Hollywood’s special effects laden simplifications and perversions of reality, and John Tusa’s on the need to create a culture of authenticity and truth in broadcast organisations. 

Speaking of authenticity, while some of the essays in the collection do explore the manipulative techniques television histories use to tell their tale, techniques such as historical reconstructions, images and iconography, editing, music, and selectivity, for example, none, and this is not surprising given the fetishising cultures of the historical and journalistic professions, take this to its logical reflexive endpoint, namely to the fact that no television history or documentaries in general for that matter, can and do capture reality or real life. All television histories and documentaries, just like fictional films and fictional television programmes, may represent reality, they may be naturalistic including emotionally naturalistic, but they can’t be real because they are inherently selective and because they use editing, mise-en-scene, and music to manipulate time, space, perspective, and emotions in viewers contrary to the claims expectations of many professionals and amateurs for whom all art should and must be “real". Of course, in reality audiences, particularly lowest common denominator audiences, would be bored to death by a live stream of the real daily lives of any selected someones. Many of them instead genuflect before the altar of that most unreal of movie forms, superhero movies, a genre that includes virtually all films focusing on crime fighters and the military these days. Needless to say, the need many have for fantasy pervades a lot of historical documentaries today as well as fictional books, films and television shows, documentaries that feed their audiences appetite for a history they can be proud of whether it if of the formulaic we did it or the formulaic we are going to do it happy ending variety. The only genre of history documentaries that comes in for this kind of reflexive treatment are the you are there historical documentaries like 1900 House which are regarded by those commentators who bother to comment on them at all as unredeemable, as fundamentally not real television history. 

I enjoyed the essays in History and the Media immensely. I learned a lot from them, thought a lot about what they said, and was ultimately entertained by all of them. I recommend this admittedly only somewhat coherent collections of essays to anyone interested in the intersections between media and history, history and the media.