A History of Britain by Simon Schama: Tempus Fugit Documentary

DOCFLIX

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.   Watch Complete Series:  https://dailymotion.com/playlist/x8t1po

Transcript

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.

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