Can TV do history justice?
In one of the 'Newsreel' sections that punctuate their 1934 collaboration Scottish Scene, Lewis Grassic Gibbon and Hugh MacDiarmid quote an unidentified writer in the Scots magazine as saying: 'We have had to bear with some tragic attempts at the filming of Scottish history. There was one that dealt with Mary Queen of Scots, where that lady paraded in a Glengarry and a very abbreviated kilt.'
Personally, I have no problem with this, particularly when the modern alternative is Samantha Morton (no relation) in unflattering black to the ankles.
We are as a people curiously obsessed with presumed 'distortions' of our national story, not just in fiction and feature films – Brigadoon to Braveheart – but also in what purports to be serious history.
A storm of protest surrounds the forthcoming BBC television history of Scotland. No one has actually seen the programmes yet, but almost everyone has heard, and been shocked by, the news that it begins with the Romans and not with Grassic Gibbon's hunter-gatherers, or with the builders of Skara Brae. This has been seen as a gross distortion, almost as a betrayal. What's going on here?
It may be that our instinctive cosmopolitanism has made us perversely careless of the national narrative and allowed its telling to fall into alien hands. It may also be that our long-standing obsession with how Scottish history is represented in fictional narratives – Walter Scott was called to account long before Mel Gibson – has actually warped our sense of how real history is done.
In the same way, it's to be hoped that the new BBC series turns the tables on those who've accused it in advance of being 'Anglocentric', of trotting out tired concepts like 'a divided nation' (as if undivided nations were somehow far more common), and of going back wholesale to a 'kings and battles' approach to history.
Many of the controversies that stalked the series in the course of production had to do with the inevitable mismatch of broadcasters and academic historians, and, equally inevitably, with money.
History is fantastically hard to pull off on television and almost impossible to pull off with the kind of nuanced narrative that academic historians expect.
I was briefly involved in that earlier BBC history of Scotland, and passionately wanted the narrative to begin, not with Skara Brae but on top of Cairnpapple Hill in West Lothian, an ancient site but at the centre of a thoroughly modern country, with views east to Edinburgh, west to Glasgow and north to Stirling; the M8 and the ruins of several technological revolutions – pit bings, the old BMC plant, the empty Motorola building – spread out below.
The producer demurred and proposed putting me in skins for the Neolithic sections and wearing a cassock to illustrate the dawn of monasticism. Whereupon I demurred in return.
We've lost our way with historical narrative because our new paradigms are 'period' films, not serious history. We need to reverse that polarity, not in order to make movies more 'authentic' but precisely in order to make a much clearer distinction between entertainment and scholarship...
Read entire article at Guardian (UK)
Personally, I have no problem with this, particularly when the modern alternative is Samantha Morton (no relation) in unflattering black to the ankles.
We are as a people curiously obsessed with presumed 'distortions' of our national story, not just in fiction and feature films – Brigadoon to Braveheart – but also in what purports to be serious history.
A storm of protest surrounds the forthcoming BBC television history of Scotland. No one has actually seen the programmes yet, but almost everyone has heard, and been shocked by, the news that it begins with the Romans and not with Grassic Gibbon's hunter-gatherers, or with the builders of Skara Brae. This has been seen as a gross distortion, almost as a betrayal. What's going on here?
It may be that our instinctive cosmopolitanism has made us perversely careless of the national narrative and allowed its telling to fall into alien hands. It may also be that our long-standing obsession with how Scottish history is represented in fictional narratives – Walter Scott was called to account long before Mel Gibson – has actually warped our sense of how real history is done.
In the same way, it's to be hoped that the new BBC series turns the tables on those who've accused it in advance of being 'Anglocentric', of trotting out tired concepts like 'a divided nation' (as if undivided nations were somehow far more common), and of going back wholesale to a 'kings and battles' approach to history.
Many of the controversies that stalked the series in the course of production had to do with the inevitable mismatch of broadcasters and academic historians, and, equally inevitably, with money.
History is fantastically hard to pull off on television and almost impossible to pull off with the kind of nuanced narrative that academic historians expect.
I was briefly involved in that earlier BBC history of Scotland, and passionately wanted the narrative to begin, not with Skara Brae but on top of Cairnpapple Hill in West Lothian, an ancient site but at the centre of a thoroughly modern country, with views east to Edinburgh, west to Glasgow and north to Stirling; the M8 and the ruins of several technological revolutions – pit bings, the old BMC plant, the empty Motorola building – spread out below.
The producer demurred and proposed putting me in skins for the Neolithic sections and wearing a cassock to illustrate the dawn of monasticism. Whereupon I demurred in return.
We've lost our way with historical narrative because our new paradigms are 'period' films, not serious history. We need to reverse that polarity, not in order to make movies more 'authentic' but precisely in order to make a much clearer distinction between entertainment and scholarship...