Television history, and history more generally, tells us as
much about the time in which we live, as about the period and events under
consideration. Nowhere is this tendency more pronounced than in the former, where the tyranny of the present is expressed in the retro-projection
of current political themes and obsessions in accordance with the tastes and
prejudices of commissioning editors. Whereas the printed word affords the
opportunity for historians to give expression to a wide range of opinions and perspectives, the compass of views deemed to be acceptable on the small screen is somewhat more constrained. What viewers are presented with therefore, is a distorted impression of historical consensus: the dominance of
presentism.
This week witnessed the concluding episodes of two
television history series: David Starkey’s ‘The Churchills’, and Michael Wood’s
‘The Great British Story: a People’s History’. Stylistically and attitudinally,
as would be expected from two popular historians of divergent preoccupations
and characters, the series were quite distinct, both in terms of their style,
and in their subject matter: Starkey focused upon key elite figures who helped
to fashion the modern world, whereas Wood took a bottom-up slant in line with
the Asa Briggs approach to popular history. Whilst Starkey did seek to
emphasise connections between the past and the present, albeit in the form of
two pasts intersecting in the life and writings of Winston Churchill, it was
Wood who rounded off his series with a direct and heavily politicised summation
of our history with specific reference to the present and its realities.
Whereas Starkey sought to draw lessons from the past, Wood was happy for the
past to yield to the present, and to selectively distort the former to
propagate the official myth that we are “a nation of immigrants”.
Starkey and Wood are of the same post-war generation, the
two men being born in 1945 and 1948 respectively, with Starkey’s specialism lying
in the Tudor period and Wood’s in the Dark Ages. However, whereas Starkey
excelled at Cambridge, obtained his doctorate and has enjoyed a career
encompassing stints at his alma mater, the LSE and now as a visiting professor
at the University of Kent, Wood failed to complete his doctoral research at
Oxford, turning instead to journalism before going on to make a number of
popular history programmes for television. Whereas both – as well as Simon
Schama, born in 1945 – came of age in the 1960s, their reactions to the
cultural revolution initiated in that decade – specifically to its insistence
upon the transcendence of the nation-state and of national identities rooted in
descent and continuity – have been quite different. Starkey clearly bemoans the
negative effects that this attitude and attendant policies have brought in
their train, whereas Wood perceives them as positive and something to be
“celebrated”.
Wood’s Vision: Multiple Identities as the Norm
It was telling that in his introduction to the last
instalment of his series, even Wood was compelled to acknowledge that in the
decades immediately preceding World War I “Together at work and play, the British
knew who they were.” Moreover, he conceded: “It was working class patriotism
that made the volunteer armies in the first total war.” Thus, despite what was
to follow, Wood had conceded that British identity during this period was not
problematic, for we did not have to examine who we were, for we knew. Today,
those of us who lost members of our families, those “working class” volunteers
who fell in Flanders fields and on the Somme, still know who we are. For us,
our identities are not “problematic”.
Wood charted our decline which set in with the profligate
waste of human and material resources in the First World War, followed by the
failure of our industries to keep pace with the innovations of emergent
competitors in the interwar period, the Great Depression, the devastation of
World War II, and thence onwards to the post-war evisceration of our industrial
economy with the decimation of shipbuilding, textiles, mining and steel,
leaving Britain as the “first post-industrial nation”. Accompanying these
changes was a radical reshaping of the country’s – specifically of England’s
(although this was not mentioned) – demography brought about by mass
immigration from the Commonwealth. He mentioned the Commonwealth Conference of
1947 which shaped the British Nationality Act of 1948, a piece of legislation
that redefined what it was to be a British citizen, being in his words
“ecumenical, cosmopolitan and liberal . . . an astounding vision of the
future.”
Wood claimed that without the half a million immigrants from
the Caribbean and Africa “a war battered economy would have ground to a halt”
owing to a “chronic labour shortage.” This influx was stimulated by slogans
such as “Your mother country needs you”, and Wood fell back upon making
spurious historical comparisons between post-war immigration and earlier and
far smaller migratory waves including those of Huguenots, Flemings and Jews.
The name of Enoch Powell was invoked to provide the presenter with an
opportunity to underscore his multiculturalist credentials by denouncing the
deceased statesman as having made “inflammatory” and “inconsidered” remarks about
immigration. He did not stop to consider whether or not they had been correct.
Starkey would have done.
Whilst Wood celebrated the rise of immigrant “communities”
and the re-emergence of distinctive Scottish, Welsh and Cornish identities,
about the English he remained silent, preferring instead to refer to regional
identities. Wood, the Englishman, does not appear to be at ease with
Englishness, thus conforming to the stereotype of the national self-loathing
exhibited by a certain type of English intellectual. For Wood, the
transformation of Moss Side into Somali, Pakistani, Bangladeshi and other
ethnic enclaves was a reason to beam and to make reference to the culinary
enrichment that such a presence brought in its train. However, he somehow
managed to omit any reference to misogyny, honour crimes, forced marriages and
paedophile grooming from his considerations. Wood sees only what he wishes to
see, and whereas he grew up in Moss Side, he no longer lives there. If it is so
wonderful, why not?
Wood appears to be ignorant of much recent historical and
genetic research, and thus feels free to make reference to the Welsh as “the
original British”, thus somehow implying that the English are interlopers –
just another set of tribal immigrants amongst the many who now inhabit England.
For Wood, it is mass immigration that makes our times “so dynamic and so
interesting” leading to what he terms “another radical reshaping of our
identities” in which “our destinies are inextricably bound together”.
Thereafter, he dreamily wafted off into the credits, preceded by a collection
of people from around the country declaring what they saw themselves to be.
Starkey’s Vision: a rudderless Nation
The focus of Starkey’s series was quite different to Wood’s,
dealing as it did with two specific historical figures and their associated
roles in history. It was however, also about the role of the writing of history
in the shaping of history; the belief that Winston Churchill’s
historiographical endeavours enabled him to better comprehend the situation in
which he found himself, and to act in a manner that would extricate the nation
from peril.
John Churchill would have made a fascinating subject for a
series of his own, but presumably Starkey correctly adjudged that this would
have rather less viewer appeal than the name of his illustrious and rather
better known distant descendant. The device of coupling the lives of the two
Churchills was therefore an interesting one, providing as it did a means of
acquainting viewers with the War of the Spanish Succession and the 1st
Duke of Marlborough, subjects that they may otherwise have ignored.
Starkey’s history was therefore the stuff of high politics
and geopolitics, an elite history from the top-down, that whilst suggesting
links between different historical figures and periods, also understood each
individual and period in their own terms. Although it was a series that valued
the past for its own sake, in the concluding section of the final episode
Starkey addressed his thoughts to the present, noting the central defining role
of Churchill in national and international politics from the 1940s to the
collapse of the Soviet Bloc in 1989:
He had given a shape to how we see the world. In 1989 it
finished. And we haven’t got anything else. There has been no other Churchill.
We really don’t know what we’re doing. We grope. And we’ll continue to grope
until, if, another one arises.
In these words, the sense that he was damning our current
crop of politicians was palpable. Starkey, unlike conformist popular historians
such as Wood and Schama, is willing to make pronouncements on political issues
of the day that are critical of official dogma, as exemplified in his remarks
on the racial and cultural composition of the 2011 rioters and the role of
culture from the sub-continent in the Rochdale paedophile grooming case.
Starkey, unlike Wood, does not celebrate the demise of our nation or subscribe
to its recasting as a multicultural “nation of immigrants”, and that his voice
is still allowed to be heard on Channel 4 does credit to the broadcaster. Can
anyone imagine the BBC commissioning a series from Starkey?
Michael Wood: celebrating our national decline
David Starkey: searching for a new Churchill
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