Simon Schama journeys through 5,000 years of life in the British Isles.
A History of Britain Extras: Tempus Fugit - Exclusive to DVD Interview with Simon Schama.
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A History of Britain Extras: Tempus Fugit - Exclusive to DVD Interview with Simon Schama.
Watch Complete Series:
https://dailymotion.com/playlist/x8t1po
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00:00Master every king, Edward IV has got to get his ten minutes. That way lies madness, that
00:25ways lies incoherent programmes. So we said to ourselves, in my back garden actually in
00:32New York, we said what are, in order to see whether it could be done at all, what are
00:36the sort of 15, 16 great enormous questions which are unavoidable. And some just spring
00:44out, you know, the Civil War, Edward I's monster campaigns against the Scots and the Welsh.
00:52I always wanted to do that history as done by academics is very averse to kings and battles
01:00and the old colourful pageant like quality of history. That's thought to be just strictly
01:07for amateurs and children of all ages. And I thought that was actually wrong. I mean
01:11what would a series look like that didn't do the Battle of Hastings, even if it turned
01:16out to be the case that some subtle revolution in plough technology was more important. So
01:23we knew we had to do the kind of ripping yarn bits, but we also knew we had to punctuate
01:28them with questions we would ask. The first part of the series that made ideas and experience
01:34of ordinary people took more centre stage. And the last run of the series, programme
01:40number 12, for example, I chose very specifically not to do the Duke of Wellington except very
01:48fleetingly. But I really felt that was one moment, the 1790s, the French Revolution moment
01:55where there's a huge generation. When they go for walks in the countryside they have
02:00a sense of what it meant to be British in the first time. It is British, you know, as
02:04well, not just English. Which made them challenge a lot of things they took for granted about
02:10who gets a vote, for example. So that programme is a big programme about ideas and we couldn't
02:17get in because in the end you sort of live with the script, these brutal decisions. I
02:25have to say Henry V, partly because actually it was the first Shakespeare play my dad ever
02:31taught me to. I was eight years old. It was worse than that actually because it was Richard
02:36Burton, the young Richard Burton, never to be forgotten. We sat quite near the front.
02:41And I smelt what I thought was history. It was of course grease paint and a rather grungy
02:44wardrobe of the old Vic as it then was. But he was just magic, that fruity, brilliant
02:50Welsh voice. I was totally a goner to the point we were doing a kind of school, little
02:56primary school concert. And everyone was doing, you know, Mary Jones and the Little Lamb.
03:01And I decided I'd do Henry V. So I guffawed in a little chair and said, once more to the
03:05bridge dear friends, once more. The fellow who's up with your English day. I let it completely.
03:09So when I came to do this, I wasn't going to do that. But Henry V turned out to be so
03:14much more interesting actually than Shakespeare makes him. Not that Shakespeare, not that's
03:18a bad play. He turns out to be, like a lot of people in that period, gripped with a kind
03:23of religious intensity. Shakespeare in Henry IV, parts one and two, gets it right that
03:29Henry V does seem to have a very queasy conscience about what his dad did. His dad I think had
03:35less of a conscience. In other words, usurp the throne from Richard II, responsible indirectly
03:42for Richard II's death, murder. And Henry V is, but mostly we did the play through absences.
03:51We just tried to, we shot the interior of a peasant's cottage really with dust settling
03:56on farm implements. So we were very concerned to give a feeling of a pandemic, of a meltdown
04:05we're all too familiar with now. But the only way to do it was actually to actually get
04:10into a kind of window of a house, which was half built, which was literally had scaffolding.
04:15Sorry BBC health and safety. And I was literally walking the plank. And as I was walking the
04:20plank, there was this tremendously impressive ripping sound. And it was a sudden sharp breeze
04:25on my backside. And indeed half my trousers fell away, ripped by a large nail. And I thought,
04:31you know, I'm too old for this really.
04:37There were moments early on, I was saying to people, you know, when you're kind of lying
04:42in a kind of freezing tomb in the Albany, you think, what the hell am I at one o'clock
04:45in the morning, sort of sleeting outside. What the hell am I doing here?
05:00Why has there never been a history of the Britain? Answer, the weather, you know, you're
05:03working in brutal conditions. In Ireland, huge, one of those thunderstorms on the Atlantic
05:13coast where the brain feels like needles, it's kind of slicing right through your anorak.
05:19And you still have to rather absurdly kind of deliver. You do feel a prat sometimes when
05:24you kind of this huge gale going on. And you're shouting, you can't ever shout, because you're
05:32wearing a radio mic and there's no need to shout, they can hear you perfectly well. But
05:35you feel like King Lear, you know, crack, tempest, burn, and, you know, smoke. And just
05:42as long as you get a good night's sleep, you rather madly run for it.
05:48There were so many people who, often at National Trust or English Heritage or Historic Scotland,
05:56again, when we started in Orkney, the people in Historic Scotland were so nice to us, and
06:01they were so happy we were there in Orkney, when we were doing the Welsh castles also.
06:07Contra, one remembers at some places, Roxeter, wonderful Roman bath at Roxeter, where we shot
06:20some of the scenes for late Roman and early Saxon Britain. Take four. We understood we were a real
06:30intrusion, people had planned their day out, they wanted to go to this site, and there was this
06:35bloody television crew, you know, sort of getting in the way. So we put out cards saying, this is
06:41what we were doing, please forgive us the inconvenience. And we were trying not to take
06:46long over our shots and, you know, feel free to walk around, of course, between them.
06:50Okay, everyone.
06:55There was this one pair, and the producer, Martin, he just sort of gets the Oscar for politeness,
07:04and he said, would you mind, you know, just waiting just a second, we had light problems,
07:10it's one of those, you know, words which freeze your blood, sunny intervals, which is nightmare,
07:17because you can shoot in low light, and you can shoot in brilliant light, but you can't,
07:21obviously, if the light changes, you're seriously in trouble. So they said to us,
07:26and they were totally entitled, no, do you mind if you wait a minute? And of course,
07:31their minute, they then walked around the site, there was, here you go from A to B to C,
07:37I swear, they took the slowest, the longest possible time, there was nothing to look at,
07:42there was a mosaic. Tanya, maybe they could just, Tanya, maybe they could just stand...
07:48You'll just aggravate them, they'll just, they'll take even longer.
07:53But that was so rare, we were just met with outpourings of every conceivable kind of hospitality.
08:02We were in an extraordinary, an amazing location, a blitzed out, the last
08:10cotton mill of the 1830s in Manchester, at Ancoats, a very tough part of Manchester,
08:16filled with Scotters now, not yet been gentrified. We had to actually, had to have a kind of sweep
08:22of it, because there were kind of syringes, and bad discarded needles, and not good things lying
08:28around. But it was still the only intact interior, it's peeling and, you know, damaged. It looked
08:34like the isle of a church, these kind of steel supporting columns were very beautiful, iron I
08:40should say, not steel, very beautifully fabricated. And we'd just come from an amazing church interior
08:48at Cheadle in Staffordshire, not far away, at Augustus Pugin, gorgeous Gothic revival
08:53Catholic church. And the Gothic revival, the Middle Ages revival is all about trying to find
08:59some moral moorings, which would help you get through the pain of industrialism.
09:04So it's not a direct cut from that, but we wanted to shoot it really, as if it were a kind of,
09:13you know, the church of capitalism. So that was really a wonderful, that was a sort of little
09:19epiphany, some great and improbable places that came up and sprung at you and sort of took over
09:27how you were feeling. They were really great.
09:33So moving and upsetting at the same time. But I've always, you know, when you go to the West
09:39Indies as a tourist, there's always a kind of problem. The legacy of slavery is still in front
09:44of you, guess what, you know, all the waiters are one colour and all tourists are another colour.
09:49And you feel terrible, I think, or maybe most people don't, but I do. And actually, the first
09:55time working about, deliberately out front about what the problem is, and how it started, felt
10:02good, if not good, it felt at least you were not, you know, in a position of bad faith.
10:07So the Slavery Museum were these little jewel-like objects we were showing,
10:12which turned out to be branding irons, but they were made of silver. This was both unbearable
10:17and overwhelming, but actually people again were so happy that we were actually putting
10:22them on screen, as we were, waving their axes and whirling them around their heads.
10:28And then you just cut a little bit to a distant wide shot and you, the viewer,
10:34and then you have to intercut it with the Bayeux Tapestry, the world's greatest first news strip,
10:38really fantastic. But then the battle ends, and I so wanted, one thing you notice about the
10:45Bayeux Tapestry, it's very explicit. There are bodies that are chopped up and are naked and
10:50they're having their armour, nobody's wearing Y-fronts under their armour in 1066,
10:55they're actually naked when their armour's being pulled off them by scavenging peasants.
10:59And I didn't want that, I just wanted a pile of bodies, you know, just ten or so, with no clothes
11:06on, but you know, no, it would just have to be arms, but it would have to be covered in mud and
11:11you know, make-up blood is not expensive. But you have to persuade your re-enactors,
11:16Regia Anglorum, who's sort of professional Vikings, men who like wearing, you know, funny
11:21hats with cows on them. Sorry, they were really nice, but you have to persuade them.
11:26And the director said to me, there's no way they're going to take their kit off, you know,
11:29they're just not going to do it. I said, well, I'll do it, you know, I don't mind, you know,
11:32so we'll all do it. But actually no one, that was early on the series, I was still baby presenter,
11:38and no one took me seriously, and I still know what it would have been like to take that single
11:42shot, actually. On the other hand, Beckett, to do the murder of Beckett, which had to intercut
11:49between me telling the story at the spot in the cathedral, I thought we got as right as we could
11:55do it. Claire Bevan just had something magical about four horsemen, not the apocalypse, huge
12:03wide, actually, with them just coming over the horizon, silhouette shot on the horizon.
12:08And then suddenly they are very close up, but it's not a knee handheld, it was actually
12:14quite fast tracking shot behind a group of knights. There's nothing more creepy than
12:19actually chainmail seen at neck height from behind, just walking along very heavily. There
12:26is something about the way people walk in armour, which is unbelievably sinister. And I thought she
12:32just, in terms of pacing and how we actually did sound mix, it worked as well as we could.
12:40Another one, a wonderful shot, which I love, where Henry II and Beckett are almost reconciled,
12:49but you don't feel it's going to last. And we know, again from a document, that they ride towards
12:54each other, and then the king asks Beckett whether he would ride with him, and Beckett said,
13:00I'm sorry, I've got to be back at my sea at Canterbury or something. And you have the two
13:05riders come towards a single tree silhouetted on hill, and the riders just turn around
13:13and just gently trot stage left and stage right. It's a heartbreaking moment, actually.
13:26Same film, sometimes you just take advantage of the weather or something that location gives you,
13:32that you don't, which it does nothing in terms of the telling the story, but except it moves
13:38the feeling of the story along. Again, when we were doing the story of Henry and Beckett's
13:44rows and reconciliations, I just tell the story walking by the side of a river in France. And
13:49there were poplar trees, as almost always are in Lombardy poplars in France. And some of the
13:56leaves were starting to get a little yellow, and they were falling into the river and making eddies.
14:02And the trees were doing a kind of dance, very slow, sinuous dance in the air, and the wind
14:09for sound was just singing. It was just absolutely beautiful. And Claire and I, the director,
14:16we just looked at each other and said, wow, this is the best chorus you could possibly have.
14:20It was like a lament. It was that the location was doing the lament for us. And then another way,
14:26and that we'd use, for example, a late medieval, sort of early 16th century one to use, for example,
14:33for the execution of Charles I, where we wanted simply to not show in a cliche way an axe flying
14:42through the air, but actually the expression in people's eyes when it was happening. That's a film,
14:47I should say, to everybody. You're looking at program nine called Revolutions. It's a program
14:52all about seeing. It's about optics. It's about visions, about wide open eyes, the light of God,
14:58or the light of optics, the light of Newton's telescope. And there we kept on re-figuring
15:08songs. For Charles I's execution, we used Mare Mare. We used a 17th century Baroque composer
15:14full of kind of aggressive, soaring viola da gamba sounds. So we had a kind of very mixed
15:23color of palette.
15:39The last place that we, the very last thing we shot, it was so moving, it seemed so fitting,
15:57was a sequence about the Irish potato famine. And it was one of those places where the location
16:03sings and speaks to you, really. The location itself is an actor. We were right on the Atlantic
16:08Rim in Donegal, near the little port of Clifton. And so many, not only babies were dying during
16:151846, but priests were dying at a rate that was so appalling, there was no time to baptize these
16:21babies. So there was no consecrated ground for them to be buried in. So the dads, it was the dads
16:27apparently, took the babies in their arms and took them to what had been old pagan sites right
16:33on the edge of the cliff. And it was one of those wild, keening days with brilliant sunlight and
16:38the Atlantic was boiling over the Irish cliffs. And these tiny little rough stone markers set up
16:46in a circle, 40 or 50 of these little, minute, rough, lichen-colored graves. And it was once
16:53said, you know, Michelet, the historian said, the job of history is to resurrect the dead.
16:57And boy, it just flowed through us. At that particular moment, everybody was standing
17:02around fighting back the tears. And it was one of those moments you had no doubt,
17:08this was, making that shot, doing that little sequence was a good thing to do. It sort of ceased
17:15to be part of television. It was just a good... I have two projects I do want to try and, in a way,
17:21try and reinvent, which is a very pretentious thing. There's a way of doing, I teach history
17:25of art more than I do in America. And I was the art critic for New Yorker. And for me, often works
17:31of art are themselves historical dramas, the assassination of Mara Guernica. And I would love
17:37to be able to do a new kind of art programming, actually. And we are, as I say, in talks now.
17:43Also, I want to do a much more modest thing called Rough Crossings, which is about the Anglo-American
17:48passage, people who find themselves in the wrong place, Bacchahontas in London,
17:52the Black Redcoats, a great story, the slaves who were freed for defecting to the British lines in
17:58the War of Revolution. So those are my two projects. One is a project of kind of cameos
18:03that builds into an understanding of what the Atlantic relationship and its perils is.
18:09The other is sort of a bigger project about trying to make art part of people's lives. It
18:14already is, but. And then I think I'll just die.