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He maintains the vigour of his discipline but he also
understands the role he has taken on. Michael Wood
recognises that he’s on the proper telly, not the Open
University, and in so doing he also maintains the
vigour of his companion discipline - presenting.
Michael Wood is still captivating British audiences
with his history programmes more than
thirty years after his 1979 debut programme
In Search of the Dark Ages.
It was the historian AJ P Taylor, who
pioneered academic presentations of
history on radio and television over 60 years
ago. Like Michael Wood, Taylor was both a
Lancastrian and a graduate of Oriel College,
Oxford. Back then his fellow Oxford dons
frowned on his media career, calling his
newspapers and magazine columns ‘highly
distasteful’. It can’t have helped with the
gossip in the quad that when he was on the
payroll at Oxford he was such an extraordinarily
popular speaker he had to give his lectures at 8.30am
to avoid the room becoming over-crowded. Taylor
was a storyteller and his books proved to be
compulsively readable, bringing academic learning
to a public audience. Lead balloon stuff that in the
Senior Common Room at Oxford in the 1950s.
tabloids for his blond good looks, sheepskin coat and
trendy jeans (jeans on BBC2 in 1979!) you’ll just have
to take my word for it when I say I loved Mr Woods
for his presentation skills. The Sunday Express called
him
'the Indiana Jones of factual television
.’
Forget accessible. Wood made history exciting.
He made it watchable.
I believe that the art of presenting
history on television is essentially
the art of being a good tour guide.
Knowing an awful lot about your
subject is key but it’s not everything.
After all who really wants to know
everything you know
about a subject?
Michael Wood has a history degree
from Oxford, which, as we shall see,
is virtually the historian’s passport
from the ivory tower to the television
tower, but he also played Grusha in
the first British amateur production of Brecht’s
Caucasian Chalk Circle and he packed in his doctorate
half way through for journalism, spending six years as
a local television reporter before he got to make a
history programme. Mr Wood is a born
communicator, a trained presenter and above all he
is an entertainer.