A History of Britain by Simon Schama: The Rest is History with Mark Lawson
Simon Schama journeys through 5,000 years of life in the British Isles.
A History of Britain Extras: An introduction to the documentary series A History of Britain. Mark Lawson talks to Simon Schama about the background to the series.
Watch Complete Series:
https://dailymotion.com/playlist/x8t1po
A History of Britain Extras: An introduction to the documentary series A History of Britain. Mark Lawson talks to Simon Schama about the background to the series.
Watch Complete Series:
https://dailymotion.com/playlist/x8t1po
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TVTranscript
00:00But although the series is made on a huge scale, its hopes finally focus on one man,
00:24a British academic now living in America, and the author of acclaimed books on Rembrandt
00:29and the French Revolution, among other subjects, Professor Simon Sharma.
00:33Simon Sharma, you were part of the first generation able to watch history programs on television.
00:37Did they make an impact on you?
00:39Enormous.
00:40A.J.P.
00:41Taylor, great hero, pioneer of the arts, gave what I suppose you'd call a lecture.
00:47There was no set, there was no location, not a man walking around in ruins.
00:53Just black.
00:54But out of that black, out of Taylor's combination of storytelling and wit and argument, was
01:01amazingly powerful performance, all done without notes, because the world was inside him.
01:07It just came tumbling out, natural storyteller, natural arguer as storyteller, and that was
01:13wonderful and made me want to attempt to be one.
01:17One of the reasons this kind of television went out of fashion for a while in the 90s
01:22was an unease about the fact of one person presenting, because people, as you know,
01:27will say, well, he's white, he's male, he's British, he lives in America now, all of those
01:32things.
01:33Now, you don't, which would have been one alternative, allow other voices into the series.
01:38In a way, when you have a subjective essay, actually, the kind of consensus trap is avoided.
01:45You know it's just Sharma's, you know, stories and arguments about what British history,
01:52the road British history has taken.
01:54The danger for me is that in the United States, at least, you have two African-Americans and
02:01then you have two white rednecks and then you have, you know, two women and two men
02:06and a child and a granny or something.
02:08So somehow out of this perfectly arranged salad of opinions, a totally coherent and
02:14satisfying and tasty dish, which will not offend anyone, and you'll leave the program
02:19saying yes, that is how it was in 1938 or 1258 or something.
02:25I would much rather, actually, people take issue with me, get mad as hell, write back
02:31saying, you know, why does this particular king or, you know, this particular peasant
02:37rebellion fly past at warp speed?
02:39And that's much better.
02:41That does seem to me in the nature.
02:44The most compelling history is the most kind of shamelessly, personally engaged.
02:49So I'm happy with that format.
02:52But people will be looking for your stars.
02:56Would you be saying you were objective in this?
02:58No, God, no, it's not a word I ever, you know, I've never felt, I'm not a complete relativist
03:05either.
03:06I don't believe there is no such thing as historical truth.
03:07It's just incredibly complicated and difficult to get there.
03:10And as soon as the D word is indefinitive, passes your lips, the other D word is true,
03:14you're dead, you know, really.
03:17So note the careful use of the indefinite article in this series.
03:22This is called A History of Britain.
03:24And both the first word and the last word in that title are problematic.
03:28It's A History because it's shamelessly my own subjective interpretation of this, you
03:34know, these thousands of years of history.
03:37Because Britain itself has, you know, been an axiomatic nation for a very short time.
03:45And you know, it was a problematic nation in the way in which it came into being in
03:48the 17th and 18th century and remains something which is not constant and sempiternal, but
03:56actually something always in a state of flux and change.
03:59So my view is A, it's certainly subjective.
04:03And it is a series about the nature of changing national identity.
04:07That's one of our big stories in the series.
04:11And I'm now asking you to reduce 16 Hours and the huge book into a few sentences, but
04:18if you could give a sense of the stance, I mean, the approach, the argument you're taking
04:22through the series.
04:23Right.
04:24Well, in the first instance, the sense in which there is a kind of septodile history,
04:29but there is Churchillian history, there is white, Protestant, parliamentary Britain.
04:36That we now really reject so emphatically, in my view, that actually we may be in danger
04:44of losing some fundamental truths that are still there.
04:48So even though this is a series, which as I say in the preface of the book, any history
04:53series about Britain has to be about alteration, the alteration from empire to a multicultural
04:58Britain, the alteration from a French-speaking, Norman, baronial place to something that suddenly
05:06becomes very self-conscious about its Englishness at a point.
05:10There is some kind of bedrock of weird peculiarity at the heart of it all.
05:16It wasn't just fantasy that in the middle of the 13th century, we had a huge uprising
05:23of both people and barons against the Plantagenet dynasty after Magna Carta.
05:28Nothing like that happened anywhere else in feudal Europe.
05:32So I'm kind of wanting to bring these elements of mutation, change, shifting identity and
05:39things that have always been there in negotiation with each other, in argument with each other.
05:45Number two, this is the history of Britain, not just history of England with walk-on roles
05:48for the Scots and the Irish and the Welsh.
05:51You don't have to be kind of ethnically correct about Britain, you know, to actually see that
05:57there was a troubled history.
05:59But you only sort of are honest really about the nature of British history if you face
06:04up to the fact there are an awful lot of skeletons in our particular family closet.
06:09And an example of those skeletons that you're bringing out?
06:13Well, religion is a huge story.
06:16I mean, for a lapsed Jew to be doing this is either an incredible joke, you know, or
06:20actually a very good idea, because I certainly have no stake in the goodness or badness of
06:26the Reformation, but it's a riveting story for me.
06:30We have, in my view, the British wars of religion that go on until the middle of the 18th century.
06:37It's an endless horror, actually, in the story of our country's history.
06:43And because we are possibly now the most secular country in the world, you know, I don't know,
06:48certainly in the Western world, religion just seems so remote somehow as something
06:56which people are going to die for and get excited about and have heart attacks about.
07:01And lives and deaths of both the mighty and the humble were going to turn on this issue
07:06of allegiance.
07:08And the kind of raveling together of what you are as a people and what you are as a
07:11church is just extraordinarily important.
07:14And 16 hours sounds like a lot, and it is in terms of TV, but you've got 5,000 years,
07:19so that process of choosing the events and themes, can you talk about how you navigate that?
07:25Yeah, we always, inclusiveness is impossible.
07:28In some ways, one shouldn't, you know, whine about this, because it's what you do when
07:32you're writing a history book, in any case.
07:35So history is brutally always a matter of selection.
07:38However, there's brutal and brutal, and then there's television.
07:43And we did a terrible thing, which, you know, everybody, sorry, all you Richard III lovers.
07:48He flies past, because when we did the Wars of the Roses, which we do do, I wanted, it
07:54seemed to me, if you're, this whole kind of meltdown of politics in the 15th century comes
08:00about not as a result of anything Richard III does, but as a result, as Shakespeare
08:04knew, of what happens to Richard II.
08:07That is the moment when the chains of loyalty are smashed, when Richard II is deposed.
08:15We spend a lot of time on Richard II.
08:17And what happens in the Wars of the Roses, they're all these kind of, you know, they're
08:23all these kind of hurray Henrys whacking each other at the ends of a field, you know, as
08:27we, and what actually happens to people, really, ordinary people and gents as well, both toughs
08:35and tuffs, happens in something called the Paston Letters.
08:39These are the first private correspondence in English of any kind, extraordinary family
08:45in Norfolk, both extraordinary and ordinary, lived in Norfolk, who make it in three generations
08:50from a peasant farmer to castle-owning gents of the shire.
08:55And their correspondence is absolutely fantastically wonderful, because it really, it's where shopping
09:02meets bloodthirsty battles.
09:05Literally, there are letters about shopping and the impossibility of getting a good dress,
09:08you know, one of the wonderful ladies, but you're also fighting off these thugs who belong
09:12to the Duke of Norfolk.
09:13So you choose between yet another Plantagenet king and bringing people close to the Pastons.
09:21We, I, chose the Pastons.
09:25As the year 2000 approached, politicians became obsessed with talking about the future and
09:30getting it on the internet and all of that.
09:32And in fact, culture rather surprised them, because popular history became this big, best-selling
09:38literary genre, movies were increasingly about history, Elizabeth I, Shakespeare in Love,
09:45and so on.
09:46Yeah, how dare the dead intrude in cyberspace, you know, really.
09:49They're always going to, you know.
09:51I mean, the funny thing is that, actually, there's this curious kind of coming around
09:56in a circle and the ends touching, that there are some things about our need to know where
10:02we've come from that trails around after us, wherever it is we're going.
10:09And at one point, you know, it's just simply fat-headed to think that, because you're sitting
10:14in front of a computer, part of the global village, that we are utterly dislocated, we
10:19have no moorings whatsoever, no languages separate us out, no paths separate us out.
10:25Of course they do.
10:27And maybe if we are tending towards a kind of more homogeneous global culture, all the
10:33more reason why, it's not just, you know, it's not kind of schoolmasterish point, all
10:37the more reason why people do want some sense of colour and particularity about their own
10:44story and the story of their religion or the story of their nation or the story of their
10:48ethnic group or whatever, or their football team, whatever it's going to be.
10:52Simon Sharma, thank you.
10:53You're welcome.