History and the Media
Edited by David Cannadine
Palgrave MacMillan, £19.99 pp. 175
History, if not quite the ‘new rock-and-roll’, certainly seems to be on a roll of a kind. Publishers and bookshops report rising sales of history books while the numbers pursuing family history, visiting heritage sites or joining re-enactment societies continue to grow. More people teach more history courses than ever before, while media executives continue to enthuse about history as a popular ‘brand’. History, in its various manifestations, is ubiquitous and some of its most famous exponents are known across the world. Why? Have the media driven, or merely reflected, today’s ‘history wave’?
History and the Media arose from a conference held at the Institute of Historical Research in London in December 2002, attended by some 400 members of the media and academic communities who came together to explore the links between them. By and large, goodwill abounded; academics who routinely denounce TV history as ‘dumming down’ stayed away, as did those media folk who regard intellectuals as dry-as-dust pedants. At the IHR, arms of support were conspicuously stretched, sympathetically, across the common divide. Much of that mutual goodwill is reproduced in this collection of essays (two of which first appeared elsewhere: Simon Schama’s in the BBC History Magazine and Ian Kershaw’s in the TLS). Of course, as Cannadine and his contributors acknowledge, academic and media history are different. A scholarly volume about (say) D-Day plays to different strengths from those deployed by a TV documentary. But both, if well done, can contribute towards our greater understanding of the past.
Many turbulent issues swirl beneath this relatively placid surface, however. Why, for example, is so much TV history about war and, in particular the two World Wars (the History Channel is widely caricatured as the ‘Hitler Channel’)? Pioneer producers such as Taylor Downing and Jeremy Isaacs remind us of the immense popularity of film archives and participant interviews, material obviously unavailable for earlier periods, while Roger Smither of the Imperial War Museum speculates about the possibly therapeutic appeal of war history. What about the old canard that TV merely narrates and illustrates whereas books can analyse and evaluate – that TV is about stories and pictures but, unlike books, can’t accommodate ideas? This is one that Schama addresses. Since ancient times, he says, the recounting of history has always been a ‘performative’ art based on story-telling, and he is eloquent in his conviction that pictures, no less than words, can be used to reinforce argument. History has always been most important, says Schama (quoting Walter Benjamin), at times of danger. But can we learn anything from it? Not directly, perhaps. But it was gratifying to see John Tusa reflecting on how much his multi-faceted career has been enriched by his understanding of the past.
History and the Media is an interesting read and I enjoyed the excellent company of some of the top achievers from both sides of the divide. But despite the book’s high-minded provenance, it doesn’t take us as far as it might. The chapters are uneven. Some deal with the history of history on the box while others concentrate entirely on the present. Several essays are largely personal memoirs; others, such as Tristram Hunt’s thoughtful defence of TV history, are more analytical. There is only one article on the press (by Max Hastings), a disappointingly slight piece on the big topic of history and film (by David Puttnam) and virtually nothing about the medium that has probably injected more history into the national consciousness than any other: radio. Melvyn Bragg writes interestingly about his TV series The Adventure of English but only mentions in passing that it developed from work on a twenty-five-part radio series. The book tells us something of how TV history programmes in Britain are made and by what kind of people but reveals little of substance about the deeper messages that audiences pick up from what they watch. The whole issue of the reception of TV history programmes, indeed, is scarcely addressed in a volume written from the perspective of producers not consumers. Do audiences seek consolation, reassurance, compensation for a sense of loss, justification for current agendas? Is today’s widespread interest in history, in its various media manifestations, a particularly British phenomenon or is it paralleled elsewhere? How far has today’s ‘history wave’ been stimulated and/or reflected by the media? Such questions await another book.
- Daniel Snowman is the author of The Hitler Emigres: The Cultural Impact on Britain of Refugees from Nazism (Pimlico, 2003).