3
in bitter enmity with another prominent historian of his generation, Hugh Trevor-Roper, who pipped him to the post of Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford in 1957.
Although Taylor was the more prolific and influential historian, also a columnist for Lord Beaverbrook on The Daily Express, Trevor-Roper wrote for The Sunday Times and was a friend of the Tory government and of its Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, who duly secured him the job. Trevor-Roper was subsequently able to return the favour, successfully lobbying for Macmillan to become Chancellor of Oxford University in 1960.
While Trevor-Roper had friends in high places – ‘the establishment’, a phrase that Taylor himself popularised – Taylor was cementing his position and popularity on the lower, but broader stage that was television, and with an audience increasingly disenchanted with that establishment. The historians’ feud came to a head over Taylor’s revisionist Origins of the Second World War,1published in 1961, in which Taylor revoked his former opposition to policies of pre-war Nazi appeasement and suggested that Hitler had not been a deliberate architect of all-out war. With the book widely condemned by historians and the political establishment, the two Titans took to the television studio to argue this one out, which did much to endorse the emerging importance of the medium and even more to secure the book a long-lasting status as a set text around the world.
Although he did not make the comparison explicit, Taylor – a former Communist, founder member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and opponent of the Cold War – clearly saw parallels between the simplistic oppositional thinking occasioned by the events and outcome of the Second World War and the equally reductive polarity of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, that had produced the mad balance of power strategy known as Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD).2That madness was increasingly on people’s minds throughout the 1960s and 1970s, and Taylor’s CND association did nothing to diminish his popularity with the television audience and with his students – quite the opposite. His university lectures had to be scheduled at 8.30 in the morning, to avoid too many students being up and therefore overcrowding the lecture hall.
Six years after his death in 1990, the origins of Origins continued to excite historians.
Benjamin Carter Hett, writing in the Canadian History Journal, placed particular emphasis on A.J.P. Taylor’s belief in himself as an intuitive artist, whose role model was the playwright and Fabian pamphleteer Bernard Shaw, rather than another historian, like Trevor-Roper’s hero Edward Gibbon, of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire fame.3It is this feel for the dramatic narrative, with its underlying moral, that made Taylor the natural television performer writes Carter Hett, and which put history with all its resonances at the heart of television schedules from his day to this:
In his autobiography Taylor remembered that his old Bootham history master told him after a CND campaign speech, ‘A.J., I know you don’t believe in God, but God spoke through you tonight.’ It was, said Taylor, the proudest moment of his life, and his master’s words reduced him to tears.4Such then, was the background that Taylor brought to the writing of The Origins: an extensive knowledge and experience of writing about Central European diplomacy; a concern with Germany’s place in Europe, expressed both in his historical work and his political activities; a conversion to a view of Hitler as something other than the determined madman of popular conception; and a passionate commitment to nuclear disarmament, coupled with a conviction that wars arose from politicians’
blunders and that ‘one day the deterrent, whatever it may be, will fail to deter’.5. . . What
Taylor gave us was not so much a straightforward historical narrative as a brilliantly constructed admonitory fable that operates on levels other than the literal.6
That fabulous narrative is what has made history the most consistently successful specialism of the area the BBC calls ‘Specialist Factual’. Even the then BBC Talks Department had a hit game show with Animal, Vegetable, Mineral – running from 1952 to 1959 – in which a panel of experts had to identify objects from museum collections, making a star of the archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler. As historians have emerged blinking into the television lights, their stories continue to exert an endless fascination on people who regularly admit a regret that they hadn’t paid more attention in school.
Nearly half a century after Taylor’s first television appearance, another unlikely hero grabbed himself newspaper headlines in the spring of 2002. ‘History man Starkey in “golden handcuffs” deal,’ announced The Independent.7‘The future is history’ said The Northern Echo.8‘Leading historian is rising TV star,’ were the Telegraph’s words. ‘In a departure from television’s reverence for soap stars and chat show hosts, Channel 4 revealed yesterday that it was about to sign a “golden handcuffs” deal with a historian’, went on the Telegraph’s Media Editor, Tom Leonard. ‘The news, which neatly coincided with the launch of the BBC’s new culture and arts channel, BBC4, confirms the growing importance of history in television schedules.’9A BBC News profile of the time, endorsed that view:
At a time when television appears to split every formulaic atom, Dr David Starkey is the exception that proves the rule. He’s openly gay, easily irascible, armed with a passion for history and an acid tongue. And he’s in demand. Channel 4 have promised the controversial historian £2 million to write 25 hours of television, which includes an 18-part series on the British monarchy . . . The golden handcuffs deal illustrates Channel 4’s confidence both in Starkey and the current appeal of history programmes.
The popularity of Timewatch, Secret History and Simon Schama’s History of Britain attest to our growing fascination with all things past. Channel 4 has reason to trust. More people tuned into Starkey’s series on Elizabeth I than they did to Ally McBeal, and his most recent series, The Six Wives of Henry VIII, was beaten in the ratings only by Big Brother.10 Television hypes the new, even when it concerns the old. It was more the extreme price tag, commodifying the value of history to the channel, than the popularity of history which was new. From Taylor on, history and historians have retained a significant presence on British television. In 1969, the leading British art historian Kenneth Clark presented Civilisation: A Personal View, a 13-part documentary series about the rise of Western civilisation from the Dark Ages to the present, as seen through its arts and beliefs.11This was commissioned by David Attenborough, the first Controller of the fledgling BBC2, not least to celebrate the recent arrival of broadcasts in colour, and was the first of what came to be called ‘landmark’ series, of which Attenborough himself was to front many. Civilisation was a seminal piece of broadcasting in a number of ways.
Firstly, Civilisation was a colossal commitment of both resources and screen time – 3 years in production, costing the then unprecedented sum of £500,000 (some £6 million today) and running 13 hours – to the arcane subject of high art. Nothing like it had been attempted before and there was no certainty that the public would embrace it. That they did, in significant numbers, emboldened commissioners to make more such blockbuster series. Even Clark, a respected academic and member of the establishment, was overwhelmed by his newfound
popularity. He was mobbed and cheered at one public showing and was forced to hide in the lavatory for a while, weeping at the unexpected show of public affection.
Secondly, although Clark had been the youngest ever Director of the National Gallery, then Keeper of the King’s Pictures and Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford, he had also been Chairman of the Independent Television Authority when Taylor made his regular appearances, so Clark knew something about television. He knew the camera favoured the personal and passionate presenter, but he also saw that it could explore the riches of art with a detail most people would not have seen before. It was that combination – of authoritative enthusiasm and privileged insight – that set the tone for this kind of television.
Thirdly, when it was successfully broadcast on PBS stations in the USA in 1969, Civilisation made a key contribution to the evolution of such factual programming as a world leader, earning Britain overseas income and influence, and leading to co-production with other broadcasters, particularly in the United States.
On the other hand, the conditional subtitle ‘A Personal View’ rarely featured in any review or consideration, and has long been lost in translation. The heaping of so many eggs in one man’s basket obliges the broadcaster and its audience to endorse a particular take on the subject, in this case Clark’s belief that the Renaissance was the apogee of Western civilisation and that modern art was largely worthless. Not only did this enrage the modernists, but the sheer scale of Civilisation made it improbable that another series on art would be commissioned in the near future to air an alternative view. This unwanted skewing of issues earns television many detractors, who see undue weight given to individual historical interpretations they disagree with.
Today, Clark’s unitary view of civilisation and fetishisation of individual artists is seen as naive. Furthermore, no specialist subject can exist free of philosophical and political implications, and television’s taste for the personal can make that all the more explicit. Making his films during the seismic student revolts of 1968, the patrician Clark could not resist observations more popular with the establishment than with students:
I can see them still through the University of the Sorbonne, impatient to change the world, vivid in hope, although what precisely they hope for, or believe in, I don’t know . . . It is lack of confidence, more than anything else, that kills a civilisation. We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs.12
Clark, who died in 1983, would be appalled at the cynicism widespread today, but consoled by the continuation of art history on television. In fact, the debate engendered by the reactionary aspects of his series eventually did help liberate some more adventurous commissions, such as the novelist, painter and art historian John Berger’s influential series Ways of Seeing in 1972.13Made for a fraction of the cost of Civilisation by the BBC’s Further Education department, Ways of Seeing tracked the commodification of the image from the Renaissance to the present. Whereas Clark had celebrated the aestheticisation of The Nude,14 Berger deconstructed the images of women in art and their impact on modern advertising.
As he explores, with rivetingly chosen illustrations, ‘the essential way of seeing women, the essential use to which their images are put, has not changed:’15
One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women.
Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of women in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object – and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.16
Ways of Seeing had an impact out of all proportion to its relatively modest audience numbers. It gave credence and graphic substance to the evolving social thinking central to the 1960s movements snubbed by Clark, and particularly to feminism and that movement’s central tenet, that ‘the personal is political’. Berger showed that television can deal with ideas in concrete and visually stimulating ways. It gave hope to young producers of that 1960s generation that ideas could still find a place in the television firmament. And it inspired others to take a more holistic approach to art history.
The Australian art critic Robert Hughes’s 1980 BBC series on modern art was the obvious successor. The Shock of the New: Art and the Century of Change explored how art emerged from social and cultural change, and built its programmes thematically around the impact of technology, politics, secularism and evolving consciousness on modern art move-ments.17It also used an array of visual techniques to suggest how new ways of seeing evolved, such as mixing from the refraction of a car’s headlights to the early Cubist fractures of Braque’s vision:
Television does not lend itself to abstract argument or lengthy categorisation. If the making of the series had one repeated phrase that still echoes in my head, it was not heard on the soundtrack; the inexorable voice of Lorna Pegram, the producer, muttering: ‘It’s a clever argument, Bob dear, but what are we supposed to be looking at?’. What the Box can do is show things, and tell . . . the great virtue of TV is its power to communicate enthusiasm, and that is why I like it. I am not a philosopher, but a journalist who has the good luck never to be bored by his subject.18
Bored Hughes may not be, but bullishly angry certainly. In 2004, nearly 25 years on from the first series – and now, as Time art critic, arguably the most influential in the world – the BBC invited Hughes to make a new episode of The New Shock of the New. The passion he communicated in 1980 seemed to have curdled into something like hatred for the contemporary art scene. Some uncharitably blamed Hughes’s 1999 near-fatal car crash while making a television series following his 1987 Australian history, The Fatal Shore, the resulting legal actions against him and his subsequent depression. But his disenchantment with art as ‘investment capital’ or ‘bullion’ was explicit even in the first The Shock of the New.19What his coruscating critique addressed in 2004 was how this had come to dominate the art world, peddling conceptual art and gimmicks that impressionable people paid millions for, but he felt had no lasting value. He wrote at the time of the later film:
Styles come and go, movements briefly coalesce (or fail to, more likely), but there has been one huge and dominant reality overshadowing Anglo-Euro-American art in the past 25 years, and The Shock of the New came out too early to take account of its full effects.
This is the growing and tyrannous power of the market itself, which has its ups and downs but has so hugely distorted nearly everyone’s relationship with aesthetics. That’s why we decided to put Jeff Koons in the new programme: not because his work is beautiful or means anything much, but because it is such an extreme and self-satisfied manifestation of the sanctimony that attaches to big bucks. Koons really does think he’s Michelangelo and is not shy to say so. The significant thing is that there are collectors, especially in America, who believe it. He has the slimy assurance, the gross patter about transcendence through art, of a blow-dried Baptist selling swamp acres in Florida. And the result is that
you can’t imagine America’s singularly depraved culture without him. He fits into Bush’s America the way Warhol fitted into Reagan’s.20
Ideas
This shocking conflation of images and ideas is, as he says, what ‘the Box’ – and Hughes in particular – can do well. You don’t have to agree with everything such a telly-lecturer asserts, but you find it difficult to ignore. Even if such programmes make you angry, they have done their job, by exciting you to think. That active engagement was a feature of other groundbreaking series from the 1970s onwards. The mathematician Jacob Bronowski, a polymath who had written about subjects as diverse as William Blake and violence, Leonardo and Hegel, was invited to use his considerable knowledge and passion to make a series that would be seen as the scientific story of civilisation, The Ascent of Man (1973).21Another 13-part ‘landmark’, covering the cultural and ethical evolution of mankind, and science from Newton and Darwin to cloning and eugenics, it spanned the world and benefited from co-production funding by Time Warner. Bronowski’s apparently omniscient engagement with the universe made a profound impact on his audience, nowhere more so than in the episode when he waded into the waters of Auschwitz and let the ashes of his ancestors run through his fingers. The suffering was central to the soul of the piece, the humility an important counter to Clark’s patrician assurance, as commentators noted:
In some ways, The Ascent of Man stands diametrically opposed to the patrician elegance of Clark’s Civilisation. The elegy to Josiah Wedgewood [sic], for example, is based not on his aristocratic commissions but on the simple cream ware which transformed the kitchens of the emergent working classes. For all his praise of genius, from Galileo to von Neuman, Bronowski remains committed to what he calls a democracy of the intellect, the responsibility which knowledge brings, and which cannot be assigned unmonitored into the hands of the rich and powerful. Such a commitment, and such a faith in the future, may today ring hollow, especially given Bronowski’s time-bound blindness to the contributions of women and land-based cultures. Yet it still offers, in the accents of joy and decency, an inspiration which a less optimistic and more authoritarian society needs perhaps more than ever.22
Ideas continued to be a concern of television and its makers up to the 1980s. Indeed, the broadcaster, philosopher and sometime Labour MP Bryan Magee had a surprise hit with a programme which simply featured him sitting in a studio with one of the leading philosophers of the time. Men of Ideas (1978) saw Isaiah Berlin, Herbert Marcuse, Noam Chomsky, Bernard Williams and 11 more leading thinkers sitting on its sofa and securing an audience keen to have its brains challenged.23To show how different television was 30 years ago, consider how likely you would be today to find a presenter posing this ‘question’ during prime time on BBC2. Yet Bryan Magee put it to Ernest Gellner, then Professor of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method at the London School of Economics:
For a long time after confidence in the stable theistic premises of knowledge had been undermined, what people were looking for was a substitute for them. That is to say, there had for so long been a single category in terms of what everything was ultimately to be
explained, namely God, that for a long time people went on looking for some other such single category in terms of which everything was ultimately to be explained. At first they thought they had found it in Science. Then, with the neo-Kantians, History becomes the all-explaining category. Then you get Marxism, which tries to integrate History and Science into a single framework of ultimate explanation. It isn’t till we get to distinctively modern thought – to, shall we say, Nietzsche – that people start to say: ‘Perhaps there is
explained, namely God, that for a long time people went on looking for some other such single category in terms of which everything was ultimately to be explained. At first they thought they had found it in Science. Then, with the neo-Kantians, History becomes the all-explaining category. Then you get Marxism, which tries to integrate History and Science into a single framework of ultimate explanation. It isn’t till we get to distinctively modern thought – to, shall we say, Nietzsche – that people start to say: ‘Perhaps there is