Television history is enjoying a resurgence - RTÉ has bumped up its history budget, and it would love to find an Irish David Starkey - but are the facts getting lost along the way, asks Ruadhán Mac Cormaic
They speak of history in the future tense, television people. Extravagant plans for the Middle Ages and projected returns on investment in early Christian Ireland. Hopes for the Spanish Armada and speculation on Napoleon's route to the east. What computer-generated imagery will do for the ancient Egyptians, interactive websites for the Vikings or digital filming for the wars of the 20th century. But suspend your sense of the incongruous for a moment. Television history, that underfunded, unloved makeweight of the remoter parts of the schedules, is in the throes of unexpected resurgence. Talk is of possibility, potential and implausibly lofty bar charts.
This year RTÉ will spend five times more than it did in 2000 to broadcast about seven times more history than it did that year. In June it asked producers to find a presenter able to emulate in Ireland the success of Britain's "telly dons", academics such as Simon Schama, David Starkey and Niall Ferguson, who can command multimillion-euro fees for the sort of personalised narrative that has driven television history to thin-air heights of success. (The BBC, for its part, is casting an eye around university departments, whispering noisily of "history's Jamie Oliver".)
Across Europe, programme-makers are playing with new technologies, subjects, formats and techniques to re-present history to a new audience. And television is dancing in step with a broader trend: the same burgeoning interest is reflected in publishing, newspapers, radio and film. Last year history books outsold books on sport, business, gardening and computers. According to Prof Keith Jeffery of Queen's University Belfast, who copresented the recent series Revealing Gallipoli on RTÉ, history has become "the new gardening, the new cooking". Why?
"There's a high-level factor," he says, "which is a reaction to change in the world and people losing identity. The old certainties are being eroded, and people are trying to place themselves. At a more individual level there's a huge explosion in family history, which I'm sure is related. Every time you go to an archive these days - professional historians will whinge about it - it's full of people doing family history. That's a function of prosperity; if you're looking for your next crust, doing your family history is, frankly, rather irrelevant."
In the Republic, greater demand has met with better provision. Although TV3 does not commission programmes, the rise of TG4 and its emphasis on documentaries injected new life into a market dominated by RTÉ. But the costs of history on television - a one-hour documentary typically costs €100,000 to make - can be prohibitive. It was with the licence-fee increase in 2002 and the launch of a dedicated strand, Hidden History, that RTÉ began to tap into the area meaningfully. Hints of the potential audience abounded. After the popular success of Seven Ages, a series charting the history of the State, in 2000, RTÉ surprised even itself when Reeling in the Years, the low-cost humouring of national nostalgia, began to reel in viewers like shoals to an abandoned line.
According to Kevin Dawson, RTÉ's head of factual programming, history's popular attraction reflects a yearning for narrative. "Irish people have a huge appetite for stories, and if we can bring historical stories forward, and if they're polished and well made in terms of modern production values, then I think the public responds very well to it."
History on television also plays a social function by "mediating the national conversation", he says. "Irish history hasn't been raked over in modern Irish television until recently, so if we turn to de Valera or Pearse or Casement or Kevin O'Higgins, as we did last year, the public is willing to sit down and see whether their prejudices about these characters are confirmed or not."
This appetite is mentioned by Steve Carson of Mint Productions, whose company made this year's series about Charles Haughey. "The really gratifying thing about working in Ireland is that people watch serious factual programmes in large numbers. It's one of the few places I've ever been where you can hear people on the bus talking about something you've made that went out the night before. Working in Britain, you can kill yourself doing a documentary that goes out at 8pm on BBC2, and it gets respectfully reviewed, but no one really watches it. Whereas here, an ordinary history documentary would get 300,000 watching it - a huge proportion of the population. There's a very educated, informed audience in Ireland."
History and television may be rubbing shoulders more than ever, but not everyone sees them as natural collaborators. Old prejudices against the new medium persist. The observation of the television scriptwriter Rod Serling that it is difficult to produce an incisive, probing television documentary "when every 12 minutes one is interrupted by 12 dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper" speaks to the most entrenched alleged failing of the box: its refusal to be a book.
To some of its critics in academia, serious television is a contradiction in terms, defined by a set of default sins, subsets of the most damning: superficiality. The nuances of history, they argue, elude a medium whose hammy fist cannot help but simplify, sentimentalise, personalise. They deride it for favouring racy, drum-and-trumpet narratives (preferably with a bad guy, ideally with a sinister moustache) and spectacle over substance.
Beyond brush-stroke caricature, however, are more specific questions. Why has so much television history been about war, specifically about peddling cliches about the World Wars of 1914-18 (bad) and 1939-45 (good)? Why the obsessive focus on the Nazis? Or great men?
Television can convey the immediacy of historic events with unrivalled vividness, but it's not so good at providing context or analysis. Most television history has no recourse except linear narrative. The historian Ian Kershaw has suggested that television should attempt a history of bureaucracy. Although his idea deserves to languish in somebody's in-box indefinitely, it points to something larger. Because the script has to fit the images, how effectively can television hope to tackle social history? Cultural history? Economic history? Try illustrating the invisible hand.
One point to remember, according to Steve Carson, is that television history is not a single field. First, drama and documentary need separating. "There's examples of sound-bite TV, people constructing false arguments because it's a neater fix. But that's drama; they're able to take dramatic licence and simplify things. I'm thinking of John Boorman's film The General, for example. They take liberties with the facts because they say it's neater. Certainly we like complexity, and we don't want to airbrush awkward moments out. The thing that I find really satisfying is when something is counterintuitive, when something doesn't quite seem to fit."
He believes the only tension is between historians. "I think it's an argument within the discipline itself. I don't think you need to dumb down or bowdlerise for TV. Obviously, there are examples of that. But what would historians do if it was left to be a dry academic discipline?"
For Prof Jeffery, even inaccuracy in historical drama can serve a greater good. Neil Jordan's film Michael Collins is a good example, he says. "They had a lot of the details right, but there were a number of places where it was so demonstrably wrong - or at least contentious. But it was terrifically good for history that the movie was there, because it got people interested. I'm all for inaccuracy if that produces debate."
A problem arises when creative history is mistaken for fact. There is no denying that images have a far greater capacity than the written word to engrave themselves in popular consciousness. Some veterans of the Russian Revolution later recalled the storming of the Winter Palace in Petrograd in terms unmistakably similar to its portrayal in October, Sergei Eisenstein's 1928 film. They recalled gun battles and a bloody storming of a sort that had never taken place; in fact, scarcely a shot was fired at the palace in 1917, and more people were injured in the making of the film than had been during the event itself.
The dynamic of historical memory in the Soviet Union is one thing; closer to home, Michael Collins led one Leaving Certificate examiner to remark the following year on the number of exam scripts that referred to de Valera wheezing behind the haystack the night before Collins was shot by the young lad from the pub.
"Nothing is perfect," says Prof Jeffery. "You can't be too precious. There's a lot of professional jealousy - people saying: 'We are the keepers of the truth here, and we will interpret for you.' I think you have to get your hands dirty, and people are going to get things wrong. You have to engage with the public."
With greater budgets and an apparently insatiable public appetite, the terms of that engagement are shifting fast. Although major history documentaries have often fed into academic debate - and sometimes, as with The Great War (1964) and The World at War (1974), considerably added to understanding of historic events and phenomena - the classical war documentary was produced with one viewer in mind: the middle-aged man with a fondness for tanks, blood and very high mountains. Of late, new technology, formats and conceits are being played with in order to tempt new audiences to new subjects. Computer-generated imagery (CGI), for example, was first showcased on mainstream television by the BBC in two large-scale productions, Walking with Dinosaurs (1999) and Pyramid (2002), both of which were watched by almost 10 million people. Importantly, most of them were children.
According to Helen Weinstein, who has made history programmes for the BBC and Channel 4, the series marked a watershed, shifting history to the lucrative "family viewing" status beloved of advertisers. "With CGI, you can go places you couldn't go before by taking people on a sort of magic carpet. Pyramid was a very clever choice of subject, one that kids are intrigued by."
A consequent subgenre of historical drama is the voguish "experiential history", which immerses participants in a "historical" setting and makes them behave as if they were in a world of historical alter egos - think of 1940s House (the UK), Outback House (Australia), Frontier House (the US) and The Colony, an international coproduction shown on RTÉ earlier this year.
Television networks are also investing heavily in cross-media spin-offs. By linking a television programme to a website or book, broadcasters can stretch - and better measure - the success of a given venture, as well as providing the footnotes, alternative arguments and supplementary information that television is so often criticised for having to omit. "The idea is that the history programme tempts you to the subject, and then, once you're hooked, you can go elsewhere to learn more," says Weinstein.
Professional disparagement of television history is on the wane - a result of its ubiquity, perhaps, but mainly because the genre has turned, with the help of better resources, into a sophisticated, engaging and (whisper it) entertaining tool that has helped to democratise knowledge. For most people it's the vital component in their interaction with the past. But how can this success be harnessed; specifically, will it translate into greater popularity for history in schools and universities? "I think we need to meet the market a bit more," says Prof Keith Jeffery. "Every general person needs to know a bit about the past. People who lose their memory are thought to be mentally impaired. Same of nations. Though if you've too much history . . . This is, perhaps, our problem."
