History and the Media [Paperback]

I am sorry that this is such a long review, but it was difficult to comment on this book in less.

I purchased this book because I am working on a project which looks at how the public perceive history and why there appear to be considerable gaps between how historians view the past and how it is perceived by the public. The media plays a massive part in communicating heritage and influencing public understanding of the past, and this book looked like a good collection of papers on the subject.

The introduction by Cannadine explains that this book is the outcome of a conference of the same title held in 2002, and that the contributors in this book spoke at that conference. Cannadine talks in the introduction about antagonisms between historians and media professionals and how it is easy to exaggerate these. He suggests that at the conference and in the book the main aim was to "encourage a conversation between two diverse, engaged and interconnected worlds" to the benefit of all. He goes on to say, however, that the contributors are without exception those who were sympathetic to the use of the media and were either historians who have worked in media or media professionals who often trained as historians. In other words, the dice are already loaded in favour of a media version of history.

There are a number of limitations of the book's scope, as follows.

1) It looks almost exclusively at the use of television to communicate British history to a British audience. Although general principles can be applied to other geographical areas the discussion in this book does not venture in those directions. And very few other types of media are referred to.

2) A lot of the discussion focuses on how war and modern history have been presented to British audiences, with emphasis on contemporary footage and interviews. Although there also discussions about how the media deals with pre-living memory history, there is a lot about events which have taken place in modern times.

3) The book is massively weighted in the direction of television producers and presenters who are actively engaged in television broadcast of histories and obviously support the ways in which television communicates those histories. The emphasis is firmly on the positive role of television. There is no writer employed to represent the difficulties perceived by those with an academic viewpoint. This effectively excludes views which are less flattering to television broadcasts of history. This has resulted in an overall failure to address some very obvious problems and concerns that many academics and other interested parties have with the way in which television is used to communicate history.

4) Although most of the chapters mention that there is a perceived gap between academic history and media history there is almost no discussion about why and whether this is or should be a real problem (an exception is Tristram Hunt's chapter). Because there is almost no discussion on this topic there is no real attempt to address how the gap between academic and media agendas might be addressed to improve the flow of ideas between the two worlds and to consider new ways in which historical topics might communicated in the media.

5) The book is peppered with unchallenged assumptions. For example, one author assumes that a measure of success of a tv series is the sale of the associated book. It is actually a sad truth that a huge percentage of books bought with good intentions or as gifts are actually never read. There are many similar assumptions.

6) There is a largely unchallenged consensus amongst all the writers who focus on television, unsurprising giving their roles in the media, that television history is a good and valid thing. There is almost no questioning of this belief which provides for a rather dubious foundation for the discussions in most of the papers.

7) The discussion focuses on series that are generally agreed to have been landmark examples of television history. It barely mentions the problems caused by soap-opera style television shows and series, some of which make my hair stand on end. Surely quality control would have been something to address?

8) There is a huge amount of repetition throughout the book, from one author to another. Many of the television series quoted are the same, and almost identical remarks are made about them.

9) The fact that a number of different authors contributed to the collection suggested that there might be a number of conflicting opinions, which would have been of use and of interest, but this is not the case.

What the book does offer are insights into the ways in which history is currently communicated in the media, mainly television. There is plenty of description about the devices that television has innovated in order to improve its visual offering. There are numerous comments, for example, about the uses of charismatic presenters, dramatic reconstructions and the use of CGI as substitutes for archive footage and inverviews available.

There is also a lot of discussion about the relationship of words and images and the primary role in this relationship of the visual medium of communication which, as Max Hastings remarks, can be "a painful lesson for many writers." Hastings goes on to say that one half hour programme consists of only around 4000 words and that his own 150,000 word book was reduced to some 25,000 words for a televison series. This gives some insight into the challenges of making history for television. The difficulty of translating the richness of detail in the written format into a visual format is one of the themes that is addressed by a number of writers. Melvyn Bragg's chapter is of particular interest in this respect, as he demonstrates how scripts, camera angles and particular visuals are brought together to provide a coherent audio-visual narrative for a very difficult topic for the television medium - the development of the English language. Bragg's discussion of the abstract nature of his topic highlights just how often abstract topics are avoided in favour of topics that are easier to portray visually. Tristram Hunt points out several topics that have been avoided by television for similar reasons, including intellectual history, the history of ideas and social and economic subjects.

Another benefit of the book is that a couple of the writers admit a key limitation - that the quest for high viewer figures will nearly always result in the following of successful formulae, the familiar and the safe rather than the innovative and challenging. Max Hastings points out that most viewers prefer trivia rather than heavyweight journalism. That approach somewhat undermines the assumption that television is providing history at a suitably academically professional level for academics to sit up and take notice.

The chapters are all highly anecdotal, relying almost exclusively on personal experience rather than research. This certainly brings many of the accounts to life but as mentioned previously, this means that a lot of assumptions based on individual career experiences are used in favour of more empirical and objective approaches to the subject.

I found the frequent sniping at academics very tedious, and the self-satisfaction and conceit of some of the authors substantially irritating and unhelpful.

I was surprised and rather daunted by the suggestion made by a number of the authors that it is impossible to present the viewer with a variety of different interpretations of sites and evidence for fear of confusing them. Surely it is the job of television to make information digestible to viewers, to explain different interpretations, to highlight that history is an ongoing and exciting debate rather than a bunch of set-in-stone facts? I am really amazed that television professionals feel unable to apply their professionalism and all the devices at their disposal to the challenge of talking to viewers as intelligent people.

Finally it should be mentioned that although television is the main form of media covered, John Tusa's highly personal but well expressed chapter looks at the relationship between journalism and history as it unfolds in politics and Jean Seaton's articulate chapter looks at the history of broadcasting and David Putnam's chapter looks at the film industry and its departures from reality.

In summary, the book is a very mixed blessing. My main objection is that it fails to address some fairly fundamental issues about the relationship between history and the media and presents a very one-sided view of the subject. This is a lost opportunity to create a useful dialogue between historians and media professionals. There are a couple of excellent chapters, which reflect the skill and insight of individual authors rather than the consistency and overall quality of the book as a whole. More generally, the book does provide a great insight into how history shows are made for television and how the public responds to them in terms of viewing numbers.