A History of Britain by Simon Schama: Television and the Trouble with History
Simon Schama journeys through 5,000 years of life in the British Isles.
A History of Britain Extras: Inaugural BBC History lecture in which Simon Schama defends TV's ability to transpose history to camera.
Watch Complete Series:
https://dailymotion.com/playlist/x8t1po
A History of Britain Extras: Inaugural BBC History lecture in which Simon Schama defends TV's ability to transpose history to camera.
Watch Complete Series:
https://dailymotion.com/playlist/x8t1po
Category
📺
TVTranscript
00:00Transcriber's Name Priya Prashanth Theoretical Mechanics
00:05Prof. R.K. Shevgaonkar Department of Mathematics
00:10Indian Institute of Science Education Rishikesh, India
00:15Welcome to the Banqueting House in Whitehall for the inaugural BBC History Lecture. With
00:36his BBC Two History of Britain coming to a splendid end round about now, it was I think
00:43obvious that the most appropriate first lecturer would be Professor Simon Sharma. I'm therefore
00:49delighted to invite Simon Sharma now to deliver his lecture, which is entitled Television
00:55and the Trouble with History.
00:58Thank you. But it could have been the other way around, couldn't it? History and the
01:10Trouble with Television, and that way I would have echoed the moans and groans of the common
01:16rooms and the columnists that in the words of Neil Postman, who wrote a particularly
01:20bitter little polemic some years ago against television called Amusing Ourselves to Death,
01:26serious television is a contradiction in terms. The general thrust of that view is that television
01:33inevitably, constitutionally trivialises the complications of history, sentimentalises
01:40its ideology, and as for deep social structure, you can just about forget it. History is too
01:47fine, too slippery, too mercurial, too complicated to be caught in the big, hammy, hairy fist
01:54of television, they say. Well, as the first BBC History Lecture, you don't expect me
02:00to go along that road. I'm going to spend some of the evening trying to refute those
02:05prejudices, if only because the experience that I've had, been lucky enough to have
02:11with the history of Britain, has been a real marriage of skills, I think. If you look at
02:17one of my scripts, there's a line divided down the middle and there's commentary on
02:21one side and there are all my genius suggestions, you know, born of the divinity of awesome
02:27wealth, on the right, and the producers would solemnly say, that's so interesting, Simon,
02:32go away and have a good laugh in the pub, and occasionally, just occasionally, they
02:36would use them. But we did feel, actually, that we were working synthetically in the
02:42best sense, we tried to put it all together, and that's been really a wonderful experience.
02:50Not that it was all easy, the issue always is how you can manage to make images debate,
02:55how you can debate, as it were, by stealth, visually. And at times, that was really, that
03:01was very hard work, very challenging work. At times, we did feel we needed the intervention
03:06of a guardian angel, and if a guardian angel had happened to come along, it would have
03:12looked exactly like that. That is the Angelus Novus, the new angel that belonged to Walter
03:19Benjamin, the German literary critic, German-Jewish literary critic and social philosopher. It
03:25was a watercolour by Paul Klee, he'd had it since the 1920s, and at a particularly important
03:32moment in his life, shortly before he died in 1940, committed suicide, in fact, Benjamin
03:39wrote a description of the new angel you see here. The angel eyes, Benjamin wrote, are
03:46open, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. His face is turned towards the past, it's
03:53Eulach. When we perceive, where we perceive a chain of events, he sees, I'm interpolating,
03:59looking at the past, a single catastrophe that keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and
04:05hurls it at his feet. The angel would like to stay, to awaken the dead and make whole
04:12what has been smashed, but a storm is blowing in from paradise. It has got caught in his
04:18wings with such violence that he can't close them. The storm blows him irresistibly into
04:25the future, he's going backwards into the future while the pile of debris mounts to
04:30the skies. So, this particular angel, not likely to be much use to the television historian
04:37in dire need of help. We like to think, whether we're doing print history or television
04:42history, that we can order the chaos of events, that we can turn the cacophony of history
04:48into listenable music, the predicament of the historian trying to make sense of the
04:55past. I don't know, do the unnaturally slightly shifty staring eyes, the sort of strange detritus
05:03of rejected memoranda that make up his hairdo, the kind of impotent gesticulation remind
05:10you of anyone? Fellow television presenters, we have all been there, I think, actually.
05:15We've all felt this extraordinary sense of being blown, if you like. I mean, someone
05:19else said that we live forward, but we think backwards, we think in the past. And the great
05:24enemy we always feel, those of us who in a sense are on the side of television, is haste.
05:30There's never really enough time quite to be thoughtful. You twist and turn and slicken
05:37up your insights into the past with some sort of stylish epigram, you hope, and you pray
05:44you're going to be able to do that. But actually, do you ever get the kind of breathing space
05:48to be able to fulfil the contemplative duty of the historian? A storm is blowing in from
05:54paradise, it won't let you. Paradise is Jane Root's office, or Janice Hadlow's office.
06:00It doesn't let you actually sit down and be calm enough to do what you want sometimes.
06:07There's always the next big project, the next hot topic. By the way, we are not the new
06:12cookery, really. We aim to have our stuff lodge inside the human body a lot longer than
06:19Jamie Oliver's kebabs lodge in the digestive tract. Where is Jane? I know what she's thinking.
06:25She's thinking, this is a bit rich from a man who actually was going to deliver 15 films
06:30in two years, and we are currently clocking in at four and a half. And she is absolutely
06:35right, of course. We kept on saying, a bit more, a bit more, a bit more. Davidson and
06:40I had just innumerable versions. He would have to do the nasty work and go bleating
06:46to the BBC about the dog ate my homework, or, you know, we need a bit more time, especially
06:52a bit more time. And it is true that we always walk a fine line between the project going
06:58into kind of panic stations, no time. On the other hand, the project can go flat without
07:05a kind of sense of invigorating urgency. And it always reminds me of graduate students
07:12who always, you know, want to just have another few months in the library. They always worry
07:18about the great question is often, when have I read enough to be able to know for sure?
07:23You know, answer, of course, is never. There's always the fallacy that you're going to reach
07:28critical mass, that golden moment. You're in the library and suddenly there's an epiphany,
07:33a sort of neon light pops up, say, critical mass, you're there, you know, and you then
07:38go ahead and do it. It never happens. It's always provisional. And the fact is actually
07:43that Benjamin himself, very interestingly, said two things about how the angel of history,
07:51Clay just called it the new angel. It was Benjamin's rather beautiful and endearing
07:54projection that he called it the angel of history itself. But on the one hand, he said,
08:00in times of danger, and God are we living in times of danger, in times of danger we
08:05especially need to capture memory. On the other hand, when Benjamin's angel looked out
08:12at the kind of chopped up, spliced up, kind of steak tartare quality of, you know, the
08:18incoherent mess of the past, he accepted weirdly that contemporary life, contemporary life,
08:24his own times, was itself flickering and frantic and restless and chopped up. He knew that
08:30historical writing really, or historical events, came at us in a kind of cubist form. Guernica,
08:38that would be the great history painting, the classical rhetoric, travelled through
08:42fields of terrible sonic distortion, that we saw landscape as if we swept past it in
08:49a car, each window being the equivalent of a sort of celluloid frame. And for Benjamin,
08:56the message was, you better accept it, you better embrace it, you better deal with this
09:00kind of broken up contemporary world. He himself wrote about fragments and wrote fragments.
09:06Because if you don't, the bad guys certainly will. It's all very fine being a kind of closed
09:12academic caste, Brahmin speaking under Brahmin, but all you then do is exchange politely muttered
09:19sounds of regret. Instead, if you don't actually try and seize the contemporary, new ways,
09:25new languages for talking about power, people like Leni Riefenstahl or Albert Speer most
09:32certainly will, or we might say, the slightly less savoury end of Al Jazeera. And history,
09:39I think, has the duty laid on it, really, of we who are kind of, you know, the working
09:44stiffs of the trade, have the duty laid on us to kind of reinvent the way we perform
09:50our craft, not just kind of reproduce what we were taught, the kind of politely polished
09:56essay that we mastered with any luck with good teachers at university or at A-levels.
10:03We have, the reason we do, it's very kind of slightly sententious, this, but it's going
10:07to get more sententious in a second. History, after all, is about freedom, it's about empathy
10:13and it's about community. Whoa, big words. Historians at universities, where I taught,
10:19used to be basically the kind of Nike school of history, just do it, you know, the kind
10:23of rugged pragmatism would see you through. But Orwell, my hero, believed that the freedom
10:28of history was that it preserved the possibility of alternate outcomes, it was the enemy of
10:34determinism, that inside the texts and the images of history were the buds of the way
10:41something might have been different. There might have been an Islamic reformation, for
10:46example, that there were always, we needn't have found ourselves in the kind of corporate
10:51world we're in now. There were possibilities of alternate outcomes. That's the freedom
10:57that humanity ought to be allowed to have for itself. Empathy, history, I've loved
11:04doing it all my life because history is, our job description is one of toleration, even
11:09if we don't feel tolerant every day of our life. In order to do it, you need to put yourself
11:14in someone's shoes, you need to immerse yourself in the experience of people separated from
11:19you by large measures of time and sometimes of space as well. And if you don't, if you
11:27don't do that, otherwise what is history? It's just a form of self-congratulation, for
11:32which there are ruder phrases too. Community, very fancy sounding word, all I mean by that
11:39is the sort of demystification of perpetual difference. If we learnt one thing in Britain
11:44is that there isn't a kind of single insular experience which begins somehow in the midst
11:50of time with Boudicca or something and, you know, ends with Tony Blair, or currently,
11:57of which Tony Blair is currently the custodian. It's an amazingly kind of fluid and protean
12:04and shifting thing. Once upon a time, the Vikings in the English lived side by side.
12:10Once upon a time, the Vikings were the English, more or less. Once upon a time, Muslims and
12:15Jews cohabited the same world. God, once upon a time, there was a conservative majority
12:19in the Houses of Commons, although lost in the mists of antiquity, I fear. Possibility
12:25of alternate outcomes. Stitching these things together is a form of reconstituting a community,
12:31I think, through shared memory. Well, if we actually do share Benjamin's concerns, really,
12:42and I have, as you can tell, a kind of reverential soft spot for him, and we want to do history,
12:49catch the flickering moments. Well, Peter Conrad, in another of the many very rude books
12:55about television, called the constant idiocy of the flickering screen, this was before
13:00Peter Conrad was on television, I think, actually. How serious can we afford to be?
13:07Is there a kind of zero-sum game relationship between history as argument and history as
13:13storytelling? Does history, as far as it's popular, have to be kind of nostalgic time
13:21fixes, costume dramas? Maybe it does. I would actually like to think not. Nostalgia, after
13:29all, as a friend of mine has written a wonderful book called The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana
13:34Boym reminds us, was a clinically diagnosed condition in the late 18th century which affected
13:39particularly the Swiss Army, for whom the cure seemed to be opium, leeches, and a quick
13:44trip to the Alps. I wouldn't mind, you know, it's the leeches, actually, I wouldn't care
13:50to do, but nostalgia was an illness. Whole armies, actually, units of the Swiss Army,
13:56wonderful correspondents, and the Russians, it would have to be the Russians, were pulled
13:59out of conflict because they were actually said to be suffering from, really, terminal
14:03nostalgia. I don't want television history to become like that. I don't want it to be
14:08sort of thumb-sucking, the cultural equivalent of some sort of lullaby. The prejudices are
14:13this, that history essentially is the story of the printed book. History, as critical
14:17modern history, only goes back to the printed book and a time when you can actually have
14:22a criticism of an original text. It coincides with the Renaissance. Number two is that history
14:29above all is about logos. It is about the word. It is about, essentially, images. Images
14:36are weak carriers of meaning. They are illustrations. They don't constitute history, they are constituted
14:43by history. Real bedrock history are prices, the tectonic shift of social classes, wars,
14:50battles. Images really have this essentially passive, supportive role, and that's where
14:56they should be. It's fine to have an illustration of something in a book, but it's the words
15:00in a book that really carry the charge of the argument. Thirdly is that, essentially,
15:08that television history will do its job as well as it can if it can bring great books
15:13to the screen, to the small screen. The job, you can measure the success or failure in
15:18terms of how faithfully it transposes one genre to the other. And finally, that really
15:25at the core of history are the scholarly guardians, Plato's scholarly guardians, and it's for
15:31them, for us, for the professors among us to decide exactly the breadth of the debate
15:36and who is entitled and who is welcome to join it. All four of these assumptions are,
15:41guess what, wrong. And I just want to go through them very quickly, as I say, before moving
15:47on. Well, the first one, of course, it is absolutely transparently not true that history
15:52was, in fact, purely coeval with the printed book. Otherwise, what becomes of Thucydides,
15:57what becomes of Herodotus? Great scholars of the transition between oral history and
16:03written history, like Eric Havelock, the late professor of classics at Yale, remind us that
16:09history was, in Herodotus's time, although he, of course, made that change to writing,
16:15a performative art. It was akin to a kind of civic oration. In some cultures, conceivably
16:21Greece, but certainly in Hawaii, for example, history is sun. That's what hula is, actually.
16:26Hula is a form of epic saga, which is sun. And so it struck me thinking about those who've
16:35done brilliantly with television history, I wanted to remind you of, that the granddaddy
16:41of television performers was himself very performative history. A. J. P. Taylor, you
16:48might say, the Herodotus of the television age.
16:52Ladies and gentlemen, well, how do wars begin? In the last 200 years, there has been a profound
16:59change. Wars have changed from being wars of states or rulers to being wars between
17:15nations. And it's these wars of the last 200 years or so that I was tempted to talk about
17:22to see if they had common character, what they were, what kind of things produced wars.
17:29A man who gets absolutely straight to the point, someone who was in complete command
17:34and a sense of argument, and for whom essentially the argument came first, the questions came
17:40first, but through the medium of spontaneous storytelling.
17:44But the second insistence is that images really are weak carriers of meaning. We're sitting
17:51in a space which absolutely and surely gives the lie to that. Reuben's up there on our
17:59ceiling was one of the first great kind of impresarios of spectacle. These were installed
18:04in 1636 and they were commissioned from Reuben's by Charles I in order to rewrite the history
18:12of his father's reign.
18:14Now James I, the chunky figure in the middle oval panel who you see actually experiencing
18:21his apotheosis or his literal physical transfiguration from a mortal to an immortal, had actually
18:28of course written that kings were little gods on earth. But it was one thing to actually
18:34wade your way through the kind of dry rhetoric of James I's ideology in print, and another
18:41thing to be brought in here during the reign of Charles I and to have this extraordinary
18:47experience of exultation, of sort of immense elevation that you see in the middle.
18:54In the square panel behind you, and now we're going to test your chiropractors because you've
18:58got to turn your neck all the way around there, up there in fact are the figures of the union
19:05of the crowns, England and Scotland united together and the little chubby fellow in the
19:13middle is Magna Britannia, is Great Britain under the benign influence, the incarnation
19:18in his blood of that union, James I himself.
19:22This was a case really where even though what's being created is a kind of ideological
19:27fiction, the images, the icons constitute a new moment in the history of power. Lord
19:36and Charles I were quite conscious that essentially their opponents were men literally of the
19:42logos, of the word, of the self-contained authority of the Bible, of scripture, of black
19:48and white texts. Against that they put the mystery of classical history painting. And
19:57sometimes actually many, many occasions, we tried in our series, we used that in the film
20:02about the causes of the Civil War and there was another film too which is one of my favourites
20:06when I talk about how icons, images are not just simply the kind of sad passive auxiliary
20:13of a real history. The Protestant Reformation of course is another crucial moment, in some
20:18ways the antecedent of this particular moment in Whitehall. The Protestant Militant Reformation
20:25was very busy as we all know in whitewashing over the extraordinary imagery, getting rid
20:32of the stained glass windows with which Catholic churches were adorned and in our programme
20:40on the Reformation, Burning Convictions, we went to one church in East Anglia, Long Melford,
20:46which we knew a lot about because John Martin, the sexton in the reign of Queen Mary Tudor,
20:52had actually taken a very careful and famous inventory of exactly how that church looked,
20:59spectacular as it was. So what could we do to make this kind of war of picturing actually
21:06at the heart of the drama? Well we could use a computer paint box and that's what we did
21:11at Long Melford, to take that church away from the...
21:17Imagery then can actually argue. Imagery can argue but in a qualitatively different way
21:23from the printed page of a book. For one thing actually non-fiction books do not have to
21:29be linear for instance. Well in television you cannot do that, you learn to respect actually
21:36a very traditional kind of narrative. I actually don't happen to think this is a weakness,
21:41I think it matters that you have a beginning, a middle and an end, you think actually about
21:46the pace and tempo. It's only because I think in history graduate departments we do not
21:51teach our students about the craft of narrative except as a philosophical issue because we
21:56all think it's beneath our dignity to teach it and they think it's beneath their dignity
22:00to learn it that we don't actually take this particular issue a bit more seriously. We
22:07actually were very, contrary to what a lot of people say, we were very concerned with
22:11the issue of the nations but we did not want to balkanise our films, they'd be absolutely
22:17unwatchable if we had token five minutes for Wales in each programme. Instead we decided
22:24that we would devote entire programmes like the Plantagenet programme number four or the
22:29programme number ten specifically about the issue of this kind of rolling juggernaut of
22:35fairly brutal imperial power that was England and its relationship to Welsh, Irish and Scottish
22:42history. We had to find visual, non-verbal ways to make this argument and here's one
22:49of the ways. We did it with, in film ten, Britannia incorporated with the Battle of
22:54Culloden by using images and Mewing in Aberdeen when the Queen is touring Scotland this year
23:00I think. That particularly bloodthirsty addition to God Save the King composed during the Jacobite
23:08Rebellion. So that was one way in which we could make that particular argument, the way
23:13in which music and imagery actually could sort of deliver a sense of the ironic shock
23:21of that moment. It's a moment in our programme which uses propaganda and is about the manufacture
23:28of propaganda too. So another issue really is that ultimately the scholarly core of the
23:37profession is responsible for kind of patrolling its breadth. It reminds me of one of the lectures
23:42given by Bishop Stubbs at Oxford University in the middle of the 19th century when he
23:48insisted that teaching history in schools was at the best a complete waste of time.
23:54He was thinking of boys of course perished the thought that girls might actually enjoy
23:57it or learn for it and at worst it might actually be positively dangerous. Now I've always taken
24:05the view of course that workers in history are not just other historians. One's always
24:10reminded of E.M. Forster who said what do they, paraphrasing someone else of course,
24:16what do they of history know who only know other historians? And that librarians, archivists,
24:23anybody interested in the past, all of you in fact constitute a kind of community of
24:28history. Television history I like to think as part of the demolition job that's being
24:33done on the kind of walls which the Bishop Stubbs' of the profession in the 19th century
24:39put up in the notion that history had integrity only in so far as it remained uncontaminated
24:47by the common vulgar outside world. I don't hold the view that narrative history, popular
24:55history is essentially amateur history and analytical history, professional history constitutes
25:03true history, serious history, hard history. Now it's a fact that in television on the
25:09whole history really when it does seem to work at most immersing you in the past belongs
25:15to drama and the issue of whether something like the brilliantly successful Edwardian
25:20country house or the other reconstructed experience belong to drama rather than history is an
25:26interesting point. Argument seems to belong to debate, to kind of news night, to well
25:35Mr Cromwell I put it to you as protector as you like to call yourself, I put it to you,
25:40you've said some very rude things about the Irish, did you or did you not say these things
25:46and were they likely as you put it to heal and settle this predicament, something of
25:51that kind anyway. What we've tried to do in our work is as I say to bring these two
25:58genres together and there were moments in the early pioneering history of television,
26:05television history where in fact the edge of contemporary news night reportage was brought
26:11into the body of an imaginative reconstruction of an event. The most impressive and the most
26:17memorable of all was the extraordinary film made in the 60s, I hope I'm right, by Peter
26:22Watkins of Culloden. James Macdonald, taxman, senior officer in a ruthless clan system who
26:34is brought with him onto the moor, men whose land he controls. Alastair MacWhirich, sub-tenant
26:41of a taxman, owns one-eighth of an acre of soggy ground and two cows. Alan MacColl, sub-tenant of
26:48a sub-tenant, owns half share in a small potato patch measuring 30 feet. Angus MacDonald, servant
26:57of a sub-tenant, he owns nothing. Lowest in the clan structure he is called a cotter. This man
27:04is totally dependent on the men above him in the clan system. They in their turn on the taxman,
27:09they in their turn on this one man, the man who has brought them all onto the moor. Alexander
27:16MacDonald, called in Gaelic Macichrúil, chief of the MacDonalds of Kepoch. The owner of all his
27:23tenants land, the rent he has charged them, is to fight with him as clan warriors whenever he
27:29decrees. This is the system of the Highland clan. Human rent. Now I don't know whether you think
27:38that the sort of aggressive social reportage style of the voiceover is at war with the images.
27:44And when I went back to look at Culloden I had the sort of feeling of the kind of gears grinding,
27:49but actually on relooking I think it really works wonderfully well. There is inevitably a sense
27:54whenever we write history that we're projecting some of our contemporary preoccupations back onto
27:59the past and Peter Watkins is at least extremely honest about that. Now whether, as I say,
28:05enterprises like the 1900s house or the Edwardian country house do kind of succeed in immersing us
28:12really completely in the past is a very interesting point because the fascination and the brilliance of
28:18those programs is precisely that we know always that these are us, these are 21st century people.
28:25They are time travellers but we always know they have a return ticket. The job of real kind of
28:32poetic reconstruction is almost the opposite, to almost make us suspend our disbelief for a little
28:37while that we are 21st century people and instead actually just throw us into, in media race the way
28:45Carl Isle does or Tolstoy does at the beginning of War and Peace, right into the heart, walk right
28:51through the window into another time. What we're being, and this is hard, this is unbelievably hard,
28:58what we're doing is trying to make drama on a documentary budget. So reconstruction, we're criticised
29:05rightly and we should be when it doesn't go right. It is incredibly hard and one incredibly intrepid
29:11director was the genuine pioneer of brilliant reconstruction and here we have all been there I'm afraid
29:17actually, he blazed a trail for us. There are obviously extremely careful and cautious and
29:27thoughtful, it may not sometimes look that way, about the way we do battles in particular. There
29:33are only so many moments where you can kind of fill the screen with pregnant emptiness. So you do need
29:38to kind of find an economy of style and a way to do that and there were two particular examples of
29:47people who did that. One was made by Kevin Brownlow, Winstanley, a film admittedly, although a film made
29:53not with the kind of Hollywood budget, which achieved that with an amazing economy of means
29:58and with extraordinary kind of craft and subtlety and immediacy.
30:53The brilliance of that, I think, was not just his sort of extraordinary kind of instinctive technique of where he put the cameras, where they were in relationship to the horses and so on, it was the brilliance of, it was a conceptual breakthrough, it was an idea and the idea was sort of given away by the clue of the music, Prokofiev's music for Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky.
31:19And I think Kevin is here for a reason, namely that Nevsky, for those who know it, was about a kind of crusade, the crusade of the Teutonic Knights against the Russian homeland and the impression, overwhelmingly given when action and music and brilliant editing are put together, is that of a religious war, of the godly shout of the parliamentary army.
31:41And the second clip is by the great cinematographer turned director Yves Angelou. Le Colonel Chabert also takes as its cue an idea and here it's all about the de-glamorisation of battle, an experience that happens to armies whose whole kind of morale in the Napoleonic War is sustained by the charismatic brilliance of uniforms and of the cavalry charge.
32:09And that images, even when we're dealing with battles, are more complicated than stories.
32:16Just two other instances really of the way we try and produce a kind of televisual language.
32:22One, another set of proxy actors who are slightly cheaper than hordes of extras at 73 quid a day, animals.
32:31Again, animals occur a lot in our series and they never, I hope, occur simply as an attempt to marry nature films to history films.
32:40There was always a particular reason when we used them as a kind of emblem of our story.
32:44When, for example, we chose to have a hawk or an eagle, I think it was, actually personify Henry II, we were thinking of the medieval bestiary.
32:53And the tradition in which rulers and princes were said to take on certain qualities of the sort of reason governed our decision to intercut a detail, rostrum detail.
33:06I think actually we shot the painting of the beautiful standing collar on the back of a portrait of Elizabeth I with an Albino peacock.
33:15The idea then was to make a suggestion, even subconsciously, about the relationship between display and power.
33:23The heart, of course, of any renaissance in particular, of the Elizabethan court.
33:29Elizabeth was 20 years into her reign and suitors had come and gone, but there was always something the matter with them.
33:45Too lowly, too Catholic, too stupid.
33:49And besides, now her suitors had rivals, millions of Elizabeth subjects who had become jealously possessive and thought that the Queen was theirs alone.
34:03In the 1570s, they got her. The cult, the religion of Elizabeth was spectacularly created.
34:14And now we have a pig standing in for William Cobbett.
34:17This was because, even though I don't say so, Cobbett deliberately, as fondly, compares himself to a pig.
34:24He says, when I go and visit my hogs before they take up their winter quarters, I ask myself whether I, in a pinch, would be comfortable in those quarters.
34:36And if so, then it goes well.
34:38I like to think, of course, also that Cobbett, the great radical, this was his own particular riposte to Burke's insulting remark about the swinish multitude.
34:50There's no doubt that until Cobbett came along, no one had ever got to the ordinary people of Britain, robbed of their birthright by a bunch of social parasites, and turned them into political animals.
35:07The fourth little clip I'm going to show you is actually from Landscape and Memory, from our program about rivers,
35:13in which I wanted to talk about the way in which the Nile and the obsession with Egypt had carried itself into the Western European imagination.
35:22And one place where it arrived was of the old Roman villa of Palestrina outside Rome,
35:28where a member of the Roman aristocracy, Francesco Colonna, had uncovered an ancient pavement, which was a painting of the Nile in flood,
35:37teeming with Nile animals, among which was the Nile python, which is a symbol of eternity and wisdom.
35:46And what we did, actually, Francis Hanley, the director, rather brilliantly, projected a rostrum image of the Palestrina pavement,
35:53put a glass plate on top, put our rented Nile animals on it, poured water over them.
36:02Sometime during the first century AD, Egyptian craftsmen produced one of the most extraordinary images of the Nile in full flood,
36:11a mosaic pavement, teeming with crocodile, hippo, ibis, and meant to be seen through a film of water.
36:23MUSIC PLAYS
36:28MUSIC CONTINUES
36:49By the late 15th century, the temple was in ruins,
36:53and a young Roman aristocrat, Francesco Colonna, undertook its repair and restoration.
37:00Well, I just want to say, really, that we shouldn't rest on our laurels.
37:04If we can continue to find visual ways of doing the things that historians have done with excellence,
37:12you know, to try and combine debate and storytelling, just so long as we're not kind of complacent,
37:18we don't settle, as I say, for kind of nostalgic, costumed time travel.
37:23If we're brave enough, really, to grab hold unapologetically of contemporary issues
37:31without distorting history in order to project contemporary issues in it,
37:36well, then I don't think we have anything to be defensive or apologetic about.
37:41It may just be that with this great kind of surge of wonderful creative energy,
37:47which I'm just really a part,
37:50we may yet realise Macaulay's dream, as he said,
37:53of having history being burnt into the imagination
37:57as well as being received by the reason.
37:59And if we can do that,
38:01then we may also try and satisfy Benjamin's stringent contingency,
38:07his stringent conditions, really,
38:09by which he hoped, and we can certainly hope,
38:13that the media and television,
38:15which are supposed to be responsible for making the frantic,
38:19inconstant, flickering, discontinuous, hectic nature of our contemporary life worse,
38:25do exactly the opposite.
38:27Slow everything down.
38:29Give us our moorings in time and space.
38:32Actually tell us what it's like to have in memory a home,
38:37our island home, warts and all.
38:39And if we can do that, I think,
38:41then Benjamin's angel will be able to fold his wings
38:45and at last take a break, lucky fellow.
38:48I want to finish just with a little coda.
38:50This is, again, from the Elizabeth film,
38:53The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots,
38:55because it does, I hope, nearly all the things I've been talking about,
38:59the different kinds of non-verbal languages.
39:02It uses music, it tries to tell a story.
39:05It is essentially a perfectly good seminar about the theatre of power.
39:09It's Mary, Queen of Scots' execution,
39:11the moment when she turns Elizabeth's whole interest
39:15in the theatre of authority upside down,
39:18turns it into her own theatre of vindication.
39:23But what might have been a very good seminar paper,
39:26we've tried to turn into a meditation on mortality and authority,
39:31at intercuts between the piece de camera and the piece de camera.
39:35This is the lengths that directors at the BBC go.
39:38You'll see me looking incredibly ill, and I was.
39:42My blood pressure was absolutely through the roof.
39:44I'm walking around Fotheringhay Castle.
39:46I thought, well, that's going to be good.
39:48Of course, I discovered Fotheringhay Castle
39:50as a kind of stump in a miserable field in November.
39:53And my slave driver director, actually,
39:56I borrowed one of the crew's scarf.
39:59And, of course, the fact that I look as though I'm about to die
40:02is absolutely perfect for the sequence, actually.
40:05It's got a Stanislavski brutality school of direction.
40:10And I hope you'll like it.
40:12The best thing about it, of course,
40:14is that at the very end, I'm upstaged by yet another bird,
40:18which I'm sure is as it should be.
40:23When she undressed for the executioner,
40:25the demure black gown fell away to reveal a crimson petticoat,
40:30the blood-red hue of the martyr.
40:34Mary's eyes were bound with a white silk handkerchief
40:38embroidered with gold.
40:40And she lay with such utter stillness on the block
40:43that it actually unnerved the executioner.
40:47HE SINGS
40:58His first blow cut deep into the back of her head.
41:02The second severed it, but for a hanging thread of flesh.
41:09Even now, Mary contrived to remain centre stage.
41:13For 15 minutes after the last blow of the axe,
41:16the lips on her severed head, so witnesses reported,
41:20continued to move as if in silent prayer.
41:29HE SINGS
41:32And when the executioner, by now probably wanting to die himself,
41:37held up the head to the spectators,
41:39he made the mistake of grasping it by the mass of auburn curls.
41:43But that was a wig.
41:46To general horror, Mary's skull,
41:48the hair cropped into short grey stubble,
41:51fell from his grip and rolled along the floor.
41:54HE SINGS
42:03That moment, a terrible howling.
42:06That moment, a terrible howling
42:08came from the crimson blood-soaked petticoat.
42:12Mary's lap dog had to be taken away from the wreckage of her mistress.
42:18They tried and tried to scrub it clean of the clotted blood.
42:22They did so, but it wouldn't eat.
42:24It languished. It died.
42:26It was just another martyr to Mary's pathetic, tragic life.
42:31Perhaps that little dog was the first mourner.
42:34It certainly was not going to be the last.
42:41Among the mourners, astoundingly, was Queen Elizabeth,
42:46in deep denial of what she had done.
42:50When she heard, her countenance changed, her words faltered.
42:55And with excessive sorrow, she was in a manner astonished,
42:58insomuch as she gave herself over to grief,
43:01putting herself into mourning weeds and shedding abundance of tears.
43:31SUBSCRIBE