ARTS
A blast from the past
Simon Hoggart on Simon Schama's televised history of Britain Simon Schama's A History of Britain, which begins this weekend on BBC 2, is an extraordinary and ambitious undertaking. It is made up of 16 hour-long episodes; after the first seven, we'll be allowed a break for Christmas. Like university dons, the makers seem afraid that our brains will be crammed, so we'll need a month or so to let the facts settle. The series is very much Schama's own view of events, expressed in his own language, which is often vivid and illuminating. In episode one we see some bronze horses, 'like so many Eeyores resigned to a bad day in battle'. He has an eye for the surprising fact: I didn't know that as much of Britain was cultivated in the Iron Age as in 1914. He can knock down an argument he doesn't like with a neat phrase, for example warning us against the rehabilitation of the Vikings as nothing worse than 'long-distance, rapid- transit commercial travellers'.
Sometimes he feels obliged to express things in the American demotic. Of Thomas a Becket: 'From the get-go he was a big league performer. He was a player.' Using baseball terms to explain 13th-centu- ry English politics seems matey but per- verse, like telling Americans that 'Lincoln was batting on a sticky wicket, and the South was about to get the new ball'. I don't really need to be told that when the Saxons were robbed of their land they were furious at being 'stiffed% 'cheated' or `betrayed' would do just as well. I know that television has this implacable need to make everything modern and 'relevant', but it's annoying for Schama to imply that we can't understand simple concepts without him putting them into slightly dated slang. Are we supposed to say, `Ah, so it was like a turf war between rival East End gangs. Now I get it . . ,' The music can be grating, too, being grandiose William Walton meets Tubular Bells; it would have been perfect for the last coronation. You half expect Richard Dimbleby to intone the commentary, rather than Schama himself, who sounds like a less camp Dale Winton. (With his funny round nose and sticky-out ears he also looks like Mr Potato Head. This is fine, because it lets us concentrate on the story; Dr Bronowski didn't exactly look like Brad Pitt,) These are fairly small irritations, On the whole the series looks likely to be gripping, not least because once he has swept the first 2,066 years out of the way in a single hectic episode, Schama uses the time to concentrate in detail on the big events we know something about: Alfred's plans for a united England; the Norman Conquest; and the struggle between Becket and Henry II in episode three. Like all good television performers, he has a relish for his subject and a joy in discovering some new detail. For instance, he says, Henry never asked: 'Who will rid me of this turbu- lent priest?; instead he demanded: 'What miserable drones and traitors have I nour- ished and brought up in my household to let their Lord be treated with such shame- ful contempt by a low-born cleric?' which may be what the New Yorker used to call `cries we doubt were ever cried' but tells us rather more about the king's state of mind.
The problem for the early episodes is that TV producers like pictures and histori- ans like documents. But there are very few documents and even fewer pictures from Britain in 1000 Be. However, the screen must be filled somehow, so there are an awful lot of lowering clouds lit by a lurid orange sun, scudding at improbable speed over a churning sea or sinister black rocks. If someone returns from overseas, we see the prow of a ship breasting the waves. The first Roman invasion was delayed by a storm. 'Thank goodness,' you can almost hear the producer shout, 'let's get some footage of a storm of the type which held up Caesar!' Of course it's a gorgeous tem- pest, all pounding waves and great grey clouds. We shoot off to a 3,000-year-old settlement in Orkney called Skara Brae. At least there's plenty of stuff there to point a camera at. This was where the inside loo was, here's the fireplace, the cosy bed and the nice neat dresser. Schama imagines them gossiping over a tasty seafood supper. Later we see the jars in which wine and olive oil were imported from the Conti- nent. Pre-Christian Britain seems to have resembled a dinner party in Islington.
Sometimes it seems the commentary has been written round the pictures. 'He was thrown to the wolves,' Schama says, so of course we see a wolf. At times we teeter on the brink of 'Lord Privy Seal' television, the TW3 joke in which the words were illustrat- ed by a peer, an outhouse and a marine mammal. And the early battle scenes are those familiar ones in which the image flails wildly around, as if the cameraman himself was being attacked by legionnaires, but which hides the fact, ineffectively, that half-a-dozen actors are playing a whole army.
Things get much, much better in episode two, which takes us up to 1087. We can linger on the Bayeux tapestry, which was a Channel 4 documentary of its day, being vivid, exciting and essentially political. (As Alan Coren once said, `Blimey, those seam- stresses couldn't half stitch fast.') The BBC has shelled out for a few actors here, so the Battle of Hastings scenes are chilling and convincing, helped by Schama's beautifully written evocation of the combatants' hope and terror before the fighting. Nor is it a sanitised Hollywood battle, being bloody, gory and very frightening, The temptation in some historical docu- mentaries is to take a detached view, like an anatomist examining a spleen. But Schama's not afraid to stick to emotional positions; he clearly loathes William, a vicious tyrant who held massacres as often as Tony Blair has press conferences. He relishes his reputed deathbed confession, even though he doesn't believe a word of it, and is delighted by the way his knights left his body to putrefy while they fled to fight over his kingdom. (Cue shot of a leg and buttocks about to putrefy.) This is the opposite of the history satirised in 1066 And All That; it's almost never dull, it hates mythologies and it pays the viewer the compliment of thinking we'll be as excited as Schama himself. Yes, it gets a bit dreary when we see the same pic- ture of Becket for the ninth time, but then there's little else to put up on the screen. There's no archive footing of his appear- ances on Newsnight. Yes, the commentary can be pointlessly slangy, but it's just as often moving and precisely descriptive. If you get invited out this Saturday you might as well accept, but I suspect you'll find it well worth catching or taping the rest.
A History of Britain begins on 30 September on BBC Z and continues on Wednesdays.
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