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The High Trapeze of Television History
Sometimes Taylor’s stripped back style of TV
history, one man looking directly at the camera
(and therefore the viewer) and delivering a lecture
without maps, graphics, sound effects or location
shots is mourned as a great loss to the nation.
For some it was the pinnacle of history broadcasting,
the high-trapeze of intelligent history without the
safety-net requiring viewers to exercise their
brainpower to keep up. I think this is somewhat
missing the point of television. This isn’t about
television history being
dumbed down
. It’s about
modern television being
less static
. Taylor was a
great
wireless
presenter who appeared on our screens
at a time when televisions still had doors on them.
If location shooting on video and modern television
filming technology had been available in the 1950s
(hello dolly!) Taylor might, quite literally, have got
moving.
Simon Schama, for whom A.J.P. Taylor certainly
paved the way calls him the 'grand-daddy of all
television historians'. Taylor’s style said Schama is
history as a kind of civic oration akin to the Greek
performance art of story telling. That was the real
breakthrough. History for the people not just for
academic students.
History made interesting.
Moving away from the static lecture style needn’t
involve diluting the message. Talk to your audience
on the wireless by all means as Neil MacGregor, the
Director of the British Museum, did so successfully
and enjoyably on Radio 4 in 2010 with his
A History
of the World in 100 Objects
. But why just talk to
people on the television when you can show them.
Professor Justin Champion, himself a television
historian, introduced an MA in Public History at
Royal Holloway, University of London in partnership
with a number of external media and heritage
organisations. Television history, says Professor
Campion ‘
can take you to the familiar spot of land,
into the castles and cathedrals, through the country
houses and fields, into the bedrooms and private
places. Portraits tapestries, skulls, coins, statues, all
speak of the dead who once were.’
Television didn’t just cut straight from Professor
Taylor’s direct to camera lectures to the charismatic
Michael Wood striding through the ruins of Ur sifting
shards of blue Babylonian tiles from the very sands
of time. Before we arrived at Mary Beard sitting on
a Roman toilet in Pompeii there was Kenneth Clark,
whose 13 part series
Civilisation: A Personal View
by Lord Clark
was ground-breaking television
transmitted between February and May 1969 on
BBC2.
Lord Clark of Civilisation as
Private Eye called him