Early Modern Notes

OK, there’s a lot of crap on our TV screens under the title of historical documentary. I particularly dislike the ones that tell us how everyone until now has got subject X all wrong and now this programme will in fifty minutes tell us the TRUTH. Blah blah blah. Or there’s all that heavily-trodden superficial ground of ‘The most evil men in history’ type rubbish (Channel 5, are you listening?). But I’m currently reading History and the media (ed. David Cannadine, Basingstoke, 2004), and I can only agree with Tristram Hunt in ‘How does television enhance history?’:

The question should no longer be, does TV enhance or diminish history?; it should be, how do we produce the highest quality history programming? (p. 99)

To which his answer is that we as academic historians must be involved working with programme makers and that we need to ‘assume as much editorial control as possible’. (Though I didn’t much like Tristram’s style on the box, if I’m honest. Shouty shouty, look at me, aren’t I a pretty blonde boy. Go away, brat. Er, I think I might be showing my age.)

TV history cannot do the same things as carefully, deeply researched and debated written history. Fine. It has other strengths. It can bring to a wide audience the fruits of that scholarship; it can engage the public with their past. It can tell stories about that past in different ways; it can often be more sophisticated in showing the problems of source material and interpretation than it’s given credit for.

One of my recent favourites was a recent Channel 4 programme – part of its Georgian Underworld series (2003) - on the Peterloo Massacre of 1819, which was unusual in being entirely a dramatic reconstruction, based on court records. (Well, we all love a courtroom drama, don’t we?) It was beautifully written and acted, deeply moving and utterly compelling. Or there was Channel 4’s Plague, Fire, War and Treason series (2001); moving away from my period, the BBC’s superb Pompeii: The Last Day (dramatic reconstructions - a great cast - as well as amazing CGI effects); I’ve written (gushingly) before about Meet the Ancestors and Terry Jones’s Medieval Lives; and now there’s Tony Robinson’s Worst Jobs in History (both the latter using humour to convey some serious messages; but there was a lot less piss and shit in Terry’s series…). Simon Schama’s History of Britain series had its faults, but it was nonetheless great viewing, and brought a wide sweep of British history to a vast audience.

There’s always something new and wonderful to watch, a vast array of techniques and a huge range, too, in terms of intellectual depth. And, as many of these links show, the TV programmes are increasingly complemented by high quality websites that provide background, develop their subjects and, at their best, also provide outstanding stand-alone learning resources (Channel 4’s Time Traveller’s Guides are wonderful, though mostly restricted to British history; the BBC’s History website is a wide-ranging treasure trove).

Considering the examples I’ve just given, it strikes me that ‘reconstructions’ of various kinds – by actors, by amateurs in ‘reality’ shows (which can be extremely variable, I agree, but I really liked The 1940s House), using computers – has really come of age in recent years. Reconstruction seems to have been considered deeply inferior as a technique by those who brought us the seminal documentaries of the 1960s to the 80s (The Great War, The World at War, etc).Working mostly in recent history, they created a formula that revolved around archive footage, interviews with participants and talking heads. Reconstructions were a last resort to be used only when ‘primary source’ film footage (which also had the virtue of being cheap) was unavailable, and industriously avoided even when it wasn’t. Jeremy Isaacs in the History and the media volume, comments on making a series about Irish history in the late 70s: ‘We set our face against reconstructions’ (p. 48) – problematic since half of the series covered the period before the invention of film.

Of course, bad reconstructions are really bad things, but good reconstructions bring home the ‘living’ past in a way that nothing else can. That’s why I so loved the Peterloo programme; or in a totally different vein, when Tony Robinson rolls up his sleeves and, trying not to gag – or in a few cases, freeze with fear – gets right in there to show us just what those awful jobs (many of them vital for society’s survival; or filthy tasks that made possible things of sublime beauty) really involved.

And all of that is why I love television history.

I can’t help it. I have to share this with you all.

Pirates of the Caribbean Fandom

Johnny Depp rules. Don’t really think I want a Jack Sparrow doll though.

Update: Damn, I just missed Talk Like a Pirate Day.

If you ever get the chance to see either of these films at the cinema, just go. They are the only features made by Kevin Brownlow (in collaboration with Andrew Mollo), with whom some of you may be familiar as a historian of silent film and documentary-maker (on Monday we also saw his recent documentary of Cecil B De Mille, which has only been broadcast in the US so far; talk about a story of two halves).

I’m familiar with Winstanley, their beautiful, haunting film about the Diggers, released in 1975 but begun in the late 60s (and it is very much a film of its time), from the video release. But seeing it on the cinema screen was a new experience. The opening battle scene - impressive even when TV-sized - was awesome and deeply moving. Quite different in pace from the rest of the film, but it sets up the trademark loving closeup shots of the human face and figure; it was devastating then to see those individuals cut down in battle. The sacrifices and expectations raised by the wars and overthrow of the monarchical order set the context for the main part of the film, Gerard Winstanley’s attempt to create a self-supporting communitarian society at St George’s Hill. I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler to say that you know - even if you don’t know the history - that this is going to be a tragedy, that the attempt is always already doomed (even the environment is their enemy; it’s rare that you will see such a stark, harsh south-eastern England). The film, its making and its subsequent history, in some ways mirrors its subject. It was made on the tightest of budgets, largely reliant on volunteers and almost entirely on non-professional actors (some of the acting can seem very stilted; bear with it). It has subsequently been virtually unknown outside a small circle of worshippers - and early modern historians like me (I doubt I would otherwise ever have encountered it; even lefty devoted film-going friends who knew Brownlow’s documentary work and writing had not seen it before I showed them the video…).

However, I hadn’t seen It Happened Here (1964, but again the release date follows several years of production work) until last week. Fact: most counterfactual history is tosh. This is the real deal: it makes you think afresh about what did happen in history in the light of what might have. It’s dark, disturbing, terrifying, often blackly humorous; and it was made by a pair of teenagers. It is 1944; Britain was invaded by Germany in 1940. We see events from the perspective of a nurse, Pauline Murray (the actress’s real name, and it’s quite astounding to learn that she had never acted before, for her performance is remarkable and largely holds the sometimes very loose-knit fabric of the film together). She becomes a ‘collaborator’ in the belief (with many others) that the war is won and what matters now is to help put her country back together, despite the repugnant ideologies of the Nazis - and the sight of the Jewish ghetto. The film was controversial when it came out; Brownlow and Mollo were forced to remove the most disturbing section of the film. It’s a sequence in which a group of real English faschists give spontaneous answers to a set of scripted questions. It probably will, and should, make you feel slightly ill. But this is only the most obviously shocking part of what made the film too uncomfortable for this country to stomach at the time: it challenged post-war complacency, the belief that we the British, the ‘bulldog breed’, were somehow different from those other Europeans who gave way to Nazi ideas and invaders so easily. Indeed, there is a superb ‘film within a film’, cleverly imagined and perfectly presented propaganda re-presenting the legendary Christmas Day football game of the First World War within a narrative of the closeness of the historical links between German and British - had it not been for the evil Bolsheviks and Jews causing them to fight each other. But, for all that, it’s clear that much of the population’s compliance is sullen and fragile; sometimes their real feelings are expressed in terrible, spontaneous violence against collaborators, sometimes in more mundane ways, eggs ‘accidentally’ spilt on Pauline’s smart new uniform on a bus. The facial expressions of the observers give away nothing, and everything in their nothingness. They are the masks of those who live with hated conquerors. They are not rebels; few of us have the courage for that. And besides, the rebels too are hated by many. Pauline sees her closest friends killed, needlessly and senselessly, by them. One character observes grimly that the only way to destroy Faschism is by adopting its own methods. The film is clearly anti-faschist; but it is also, throughout, an indictment of the corrupting, brutalising, sickening effects of war. (Further articles.)

After reminding myself of it the other day, I quite fancied watching Holiday again. I don’t have a copy of my own - I have a tiny video collection, due to having spent most of the last 10 years watching other peoples’ (until 6 months ago I hadn’t even owned a VCR for over a decade). So, I trotted off to the local video shops.

And this is when you’re reminded of the disadvantages of living in a small town miles from anywhere. In fact, because we have a film studies department at the university, we probably do better than many places of this size (something that is often the case). We have a local video rental store that has a pretty impressive selection of non-Hollywood and b/w films, and the town library has a surprisingly eclectic range too (mmm, might have to watch Edge of Darkness again. And how long since I watched I, Claudius?).

Nonetheless, no Holiday. So instead, I’ve just watched His Girl Friday instead. What a script. Too many fantastic gags to quote. And Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell are just amazing. (As are Russell’s outfits.)

Tomorrow night I have Croupier to watch. Would you believe I’ve never seen it?

I haven’t blogged about the BBC TV programme Restoration (the second series) because I haven’t been able to watch it this year… (Well, I didn’t watch it religiously last year, either.) But here anyway is the news of the winner from Sunday night’s final. Viewers voted for a pair of fifteenth-century school buildings, The Old Grammar School and Saracen’s Head, in King’s Norton, Birmingham. They now get around £3 million for restoration work. Also reported at the the Independent. See also King’s Norton Team Parish, who are clearly celebrating.

Cute buildings. But not, to my mind, as fabulous as last year’s winner, Manchester’s Victoria Baths. Sadly, as the Independent comments and the Guardian reports at some length, work there has yet to begin. “The problem is that television likes quick makeovers. In the case of Victoria Baths, it skidded over the fact that this was a much bigger restoration project than it appeared.” Those running the project say that they expect it to take several years.

The BBC is to broadcast - on primetime BBC1 - a national spelling test for schoolchildren. Nerd TV? I’m so jealous; all of those stupid competitive sports things we got at school (netball, for chrissakes), and nobody ever did anything like this for kids like me to have a moment of glory. The influence is the American documentary Spellbound; maybe we’re about to see the spelling bee take off over here. But I’m not entirely convinced that it will draw the TV audiences. It’ll be interesting to see how the Truss publishers’ new book on spelling sells…

By the way, I got 10/10 in the spelling quiz at the bottom of the article. Hah.