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Over the last 15 years history has been enjoying a
popularity boom. ‘History’, said a BBC television
producer ‘is the new gardening.’ In the UK, history
books can sell five million copies and they regularly
top the bestsellers’ lists. And as for the television?
Well switch on at random, flick the remote up and
down and it won’t take long to find some history.
As academic historians become television presenters
so they become celebrities and among the current
crop of celebrity academics is Professor Mary Beard.
I finally managed to catch a Mary Beard BBC history
programme having read lots of positive reviews and
having seen the Cambridge Classics professor on
Question Time. The programme I tuned into was
Pompeii: Life & Death in a Roman Town
. In one
scene Professor Beard is in the most visited of the
Pompeii ruins, an upmarket brothel full of erotic
frescoes. She listens to the commentary of the
(Italian?) tour guide who, she tells us, is explaining
that the frescos represent a menu of services on offer.
Mary all but sneers as she dismisses this as rubbish
before going on to tell us what she thinks. Not what
she knows. What she
Thinks
. Oh dear. Mary Mary
how contrary. For the only certain thing we know
about these frescoes is that we don’t know anything
for sure. I can’t speak for the guides at Pompeii but if
they are anything like our Blue Badge Guides then
accuracy matters, knowledge and learning matter.
It is their work to report many different historical
opinions. Tour guides are presenters and it is the job
of a presenter to select and organise the content of
their commentaries to be interesting and to entertain.
Not to dumb down but to be worth listening to.
The dilemma for academics venturing into television
is the tension that exists when you have one foot in
the university and the other in our living rooms.
Presenting History: Past and Present
by Peter J.
Beck, published earlier this year, casts a searchlight
over this quandary concluding that historians need to
maintain the vigour of their discipline but they need
to do more if they are to capture a wider audience.
Historians, says Beck, need to remember a simple
dictum: ‘presentation, presentation, presentation’.
In the Beginning
When I was 15 and all the other girls in my class had
posters of David Cassidy and Starsky & Hutch, that
came with
Jackie
magazine, pinned to their bedroom
walls I sent off for, received and cherished, a signed
photograph of the historian Michael Wood. I didn’t
pin it to the bedroom wall, my father wouldn’t have
stood for that. I am fifty next year and he still tells
me to keep my hands away from the wallpaper.
Hailed as ‘
the thinking woman’s crumpet’
by the