Why telly-dons like David Starkey, Lucy Worsley and Bettany Hughes get top marks

...[S]niffiness about what they ["serious academics"] refer to as “popular historians” (rather as elderly judges talk of “popular musicians”) has moved on to a new target in “telly-dons” – those who present high-profile series on the small screen about aspects of our past – yet the prejudice remains unchanged, as demonstrated by remarks made this week by Professor Sir Keith Thomas. At the presentation of the Wolfson History Prize, Sir Keith referred to the damage done to “diligent” scholarship by “eye-catching academics”....

The senior common rooms of universities are famously bitchy, jealous places. A  J P Taylor in the 1950s was the granddaddy of TV historians, but his success was said to have led to a whispering campaign among colleagues that stopped him securing the Regius Professorship in History at Oxford. And to this day otherwise hard-working, blameless academics begin to drip with acid at the mere mention of David Starkey or Niall Ferguson, using words like “sold out” or “no longer taken seriously”....

The problem doesn’t appear to be with history itself. When imaginatively presented, it can draw people in by the coach-load. We are fascinated with the past. The challenge is to harness that. And it is a challenge the TV historians are rising to. Indeed, many of these telly-dons succeed on both the small screen and in academia. Bettany Hughes, for example, has just been awarded the prestigious Norton Medlicott Medal by the Historical Association....