Beginning with Simon Schama’s A History of Britain’, Hamish Mykura recounted recent developments in the popular formats of television history. It would be easy, he argued, to see AHoB as simply the cliché of ‘a man outstanding in his field standing in a field’ but it revolutionised historical television programmes through its use of reconstruction. This allowed producers to tap in to the public’s ‘ferocious demands for stories’. However, reconstruction also demands high budgets.

Another important type of recent historical television was exemplified by a 2002 drama about the Great Plague scripted directly from primary sources. Mykura then drew a distinction between how the availability or unavailability of moving image archival records altered popular history programmes. Japanese perspectives on the War in the Pacific, for example, are often absent, partly due to the abundance of material in American archives and the relative scarcity of material in Japanese ones.

A further revolution has come with handheld filming devices. The documentary ‘120 minutes that changed America’ (renamed for the British market as ‘120 minutes that changed the world’) draws on material of the 9/11 attacks gathered by ordinary people. One problem with this is that the ubiquity of video cameras in the West means that it becomes more difficult for stories from other parts of the world, with less access to these means, to supply enough material to produce these kinds of documentaries.

Citizen filming is often considered more ‘truthful’, and can have a political impact. Anthony Thomas’s film of Neda’s death strongly influenced the pro-democracy movement in Iran, for instance. In a sense, it was the ‘world’s most successful viral video’ prefiguring images of the Arab spring. However, while barriers for making these videos are low, there is no way of authenticating them. They are not automatically more democratic or trustworthy.

Mykura suggested that broadcasting brands will become more important in authenticating, sorting and prioritizing citizen-filmed events. The interesting behavioural shift that has occurred over the last decade or so is perhaps how the ability to film has been fuelled by the psychology to film, an assumption that ‘ it is not happening if it isn’t recorded.’

Discussion

The talk was followed by a round of questions that ranged from surveillance and authenticity, computer games and the limits of interactivity, conspiracy theories and user-generated content. Other topics included the future of historical television programmes, market forces and the cost of selection processes. Forecasting the style of future documentaries but it is quite likely that we see more technical innovations coming up – although old rules still apply and stories still need to be both engaging and comprehensible.
Historians “still go far” in the realm of television as they possess the kind of analytical skills and the knowledge of forces that shape the present needed for good programme making.