ABSTRACT
Historians in the public eye are not new. A.J.P. Taylor’s iconic television series ran until 1984, Norman Stone was an advisor of Margaret Thatcher and in the 1980s E.P. Thompson helped revitalise CND. However, increasingly through the 1990s ‘History’ became part of a media culture less interested in the factual than in narratives and personalities. It was Simon Schama’s documentary series Simon Schama’s A History of Britain (BBC1 2000, 2001) which provided the catalyst to push history from a standard part of television programming to being a media phenomenon, and made the historian into a public figure in an unprecedented way.1 The series gained a vast audience and provoked wide debate about nationhood and memorialisation (at a time when History as a subject was extremely unpopular at school and university applications went down). With the wide success – in terms of ratings and influence – of Schama’s programme and the high profile then accorded to David Starkey, Tristram Hunt and Niall Ferguson, in 2001 History was variously termed the ‘new rock’n’roll’, the ‘new cookery’ and the ‘new gardening’.2 The former suggests producers attempting to make the phenomenon fashionable, hip and edgy, whereas the last two descriptions signal history’s entrance into lifestyle programming and the world of leisure pursuit. Each phrase suggests the sudden and surprising prevalence of the past in the popular imagination, although in the main this means on television, and each was a reaction to the extraordinary mushrooming of documentary, reality history shows and the associated genealogy boom. These descriptions also insert history into a discourse of individualised or personality/presenter-led television, emphasised, for instance, by Schama and Starkey’s titular ownership of their histories and Ferguson’s discussion of his own family in his first considerations of Empire.3
History becomes part of a discourse of leisure, not a professionalised pursuit, and those who present it are personalities and celebrities.4
