Max Hastings: The Problem with Doing History on TV

Max Hastings, in the Daily Telegraph (June 26, 2004):

At one extreme of the spectrum, the task of interpreting history for the media may mean writing a handsomely rewarded 2,000-word article for the Daily Mail, as I did the other day on the theme: "Why are history's great men so often four-letter men?"

I am not ashamed of what I wrote, but nor would I claim that writing of this kind represents any attempt upon the higher peaks of culture. The most that can be said of it is that it distributes modest crumbs of historical knowledge at tables where otherwise the past remains a very misty, remote place.

Work of this kind is, of course, incomparably easier than that which takes place at the scholarly end of the business, where a researcher might devote months to archival research, eventually to generate an essay for a learned journal on land tenure in Worcestershire in the 14th century, which will be read by fewer than 100 people.

I suspect that even the most devoted seekers after truth will concede that such pieces can make arid, if not outright dreary, reading. But the process of primary research holds pride of place at the head of the river. If it did not take place, if academic researchers were not out there doing the work from which my colleagues and I will gather flotsam many miles downstream, there would be no history to be popularised by the media.

There always has been, and always will be, mutual jealousy between hacks and scholars. Many journalists would like to have been scholars, if they had been willing to accept the terms - working without benefit of fame for very modest financial rewards.

Many academics, by contrast, daydream about what wonderful television presenters they would make, if only they did not possess too much integrity to abandon their research and compromise their standards.

It should console scholars that there is a powerful inverse relationship between the breadth of reach a given medium offers, and the penetration of its content to the audience.

In the days when I worked full time in television, people often came up to me in the street and said: "I saw you on the telly last night." But they seldom had the smallest idea of what I had been talking about, or knew which country I had been reporting from. Recognition was high, but understanding was low. Television is a brilliant medium of impression; it is a much less satisfactory medium of analysis.

There is a much better chance of a plausible dialogue with a reader, if one writes a book or contributes to a scholarly publication. If somebody can be bothered to buy the book or subscribe to the magazine, there is a fair chance they will read it.

What historical evidence can I offer, to justify this assertion? The anecdotal testimony of correspondence. I am often impressed by the sensible, well-argued comments of people who write letters, whether friendly or otherwise, about my books. People who watch television scarcely seem able to compose letters at all. If they write to presenters, it is usually to solicit help in solving domestic problems relating to their husbands or cats.

Television, as Antony Jay once said, is a visual medium, in which it is essential that the words follow the pictures, rather than the other way around. This is a painful lesson for many writers....

I am intrigued by the manner in which the media doggedly stick with certain historical lines about the war, even after generations of researchers and historians have demonstrated their falsity. For instance, the media take a relentlessly chauvinistic view about the scale of British achievement in the Battle of Britain. Of course, the RAF's stand against the Luftwaffe in 1940 was important, and of course, the RAF did well. But the Luftwaffe moved east in 1941 not because it had been destroyed or defeated, but because Hitler's principal ambitions lay in Russia, and not in Britain, which he correctly perceived as impotent to challenge his ambitions on the continent. I found myself debating on television recently with a German writer named Jorge Friedrich, who has written a book suggesting that the British are still deeply unwilling to examine their own breaches of the laws of war between 1939 and 1945, while the British media indulge in constant eager examinations of Germany's. He is quite right. When I began writing about the war 25 years ago, I was shocked to discover that allied troops quite often shot prisoners, a practice I had been brought up to suppose was exclusively the privilege of German SS men. It is not that I am a debunker; I enjoy as much as any writer being able to describe how the British did some things rather well. But I am intrigued by the manner in which media sentiment about the Second World War, in particular, continues to run on familiar railway lines....