Simon Schama

Professor Schama (he is on the faculty at Columbia University) has an in-depth knowledge of history, art and culture, surpassed only by his exquisite and elegant command of the English language—not to mention his passion for making important historical and contemporary issues accessible to the general public. After bringing to television numerous series for the BBC and PBS—A History of Britain, Power of Art and The American Future: A History—he is now working on a history of the Jews, Muslims and Christians. He talks about the urgent need to give today’s viewers an understanding of the past and its influence on present issues.

 

TV REAL:There seems to be an appetite for history on television, some say because the subject is taught so poorly in school. Are you seeing an appetite for history on television?

SCHAMA: Yes, I think so. Regarding the school question I think the problem is textbooks. There are often brilliantly good storytelling teachers—that is what makes all the difference in the social studies class, really—that are prepared to tell a story as a way of opening up kids to questions. They do that very well, but they don’t do that well enough; it tends to be throttled by the gigantism of the impossible textbooks. So you are right, the displaced energy moves into the appetite for history. 

 

There is something else, too, though. We live in a world of digital short attention spans. The tweet world, which weirdly—and this is entirely speculative and subjective—does tend to generate a demand for the opposite: for the epic, for the lengthy, for the slow, for the reflective, for the connected. It’s exactly the opposite. Being human, it’s just the way that our ganglia are organized. So that feeds into the appetite for history on television.

 

The other thing is that there is not much in contemporary history in the news now, whether it is the election of Barack Obama or the rise of the Tea Party, which doesn’t extraordinarily plug itself into issues and concerns that come from the past. The real challenge is to connect the contemporary to storytelling about the past in a way which isn’t too forced and artificial.

 

TV REAL: Isn’t that difficult to accomplish?

SCHAMA: It’s not that hard to do, it requires essentially a conceptual jump. When you do stories from the past they shouldn’t simply be discrete—in other words, just men in wigs. It’s much easier to do, say, Frederick Douglass and his connection to Martin Luther King. But there is almost no topic that really is of more urgent concern to kids and to our contemporary generations than the connection between the economic maelstrom we just passed through and 1929. Both its similarities and dissimilarities are absolutely fundamental to what becomes of us. The question “Was John Maynard Keynes right?” sounds impossibly academic but can be made amazingly available and accessible and exciting and powerful. I can go to foreign policy—wherever I go, if you want to [make the connection between past and present] you can.

 

TV REAL: What are you working on now?

SCHAMA: It’s the most insanely ambitious thing and also it’s fraught with every conceivable kind of peril! It’s a history of the triangulation between Jews, Muslims and Christians. I’m also making two short films this year, which will be lovely, on Shakespeare’s history plays. Again, it’s the relationship between the politics of Shakespeare’s time, what we know about his own angle on that politics, and his history plays, particularly [the character of] Falstaff. Falstaff is a figure pregnant with historical significance.

 

TV REAL:Is TV doing a good job with history programming?

SCHAMA:[Television executives] always fret about “the television of complexity” being an entertainment turn-off. And whatever is left of my life is devoted to making that a non-issue. I’ve been lucky that the BBC has let me do this, and the Jewish series will be no exception. You must aim very high in every respect. More important that you aim high and the audience may come. We did a really complicated film about Obama and the economy and Williams Jennings Bryan and J. P. Morgan, and two and a half million people watched it pretty late at night—that was pretty damn good. So you aim high rather than actually listen to [those who say] no one’s going to get this. It absolutely depends on how you film it; above all it depends on how you edit it. And of course you have to be aware that it must be understood by your Aunt Ethel, too.