Quick! Listen! Drop everything! Are you taking your history A-level exam? Or your history finals at university? Then, please God, I’m not too late. It’s all wrong. Everything you’ve learnt about the grand forces that shaped the 20th century is wide of the mark, apparently.
“When I was a schoolboy,” Niall Ferguson tells us in The War of the World (Channel 4), “people tried to explain the violence of the 20th century to me in terms of class conflict, or extreme ideologies like nationalism or socialism, or Great Power rivalry. But this nasty story had a happy ending because the good guys — that was the Western democracies — won both the world wars and the Cold War. Well, in this series I want to tell you that that was all wrong.”
It was? Yes, because “it wasn’t class, but race that was the dominant idea of the 20th century. It was your race that decided how you and your family fared in this Hundred Years’ War . . . The principal theme of the 20th century wasn’t the triumph of the West at all. It was the resurgence of the East.” What about all those books I read for my history degree? It calls to mind Tolstoy’s remark about how history would be a wonderful thing, if only it were true.
You do wonder if historians don’t all sign a secret make-work pact, agreeing that, whenever writing a new book, they’ll weave a few errors into their tapestry. This creates the opportunity for another historian to saunter along a few years later, shake his head with affectionate incredulity that a colleague could have been so wrong-footed by the facts, proceed to unravel his predecessor’s tapestry, and re-weave it to reflect his own reading of events.
It’s a clever way of ensuring that there is always work for historians in a world in which any rational person might easily assume that, for instance, the 16th century happened so long ago that historians would, by now, have nailed down everything that happened in it.
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In fact, historians turn out to be less like cataloguers of the truth, and more like latecomers to the scene of a car crash, who nonetheless are convinced that they “saw” better than everyone else what happened (FIRST HISTORIAN: “Officer, the driver of the blue car swerved like a lunatic into the path of the red car — as is clear from the damage done to the two cars!”. SECOND HISTORIAN: “Are you mad? Officer, that man doesn’t know what he’s talking about. It was the red car that was at fault — as is clear from the damage done to the two cars!”).
It’s curious, isn’t it, how historians don’t seem to be able to look at a set of events unfolding in the world today and tell you with utter confidence precisely what will now happen, but they find no difficulty in surveying a set of events unfolding in the world 100 years ago and betting their mortgage on explaining exactly what caused those events to unfold like that?
Is Ferguson’s a wholly alternative history of the last century? Well, it’s often pitched that way here; possibly because that’s how TV history series and history books have to be pitched if they want to reach an audience beyond a tiny circle of academics and newspaper book reviewers, most of whom will sell their review copies down Charing Cross Road before having read a single page.
But it is also possible to see The War of the World as a thoughtful, often provocative, portrait of the period; a portrait that illuminates aspects of the past 100 years without necessarily wholly supplanting all existing readings of that century’s history.
Ferguson makes for a good presenter of what is a calm, stylishly directed series. He is authoritative enough to sound as if he’s not just a Big Brother winner who’s landed a presenting job for what happens to be a history series; and easygoing enough not to make TV history feel like medicine you should be swallowing for your own good. Ferguson is an historian who can rattle cosy assumptions. If he makes headlines you sense that these are the by-product of his passionate confidence in his analysis, rather than an attention-seeking hunt for sensation.
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Saxondale (BBC Two), starring and co-written by Steve Coogan, is a slow-burn sitcom about an ex-roadie turned pest-controller; sometimes so slow-burning you wonder if it might go out. It is sleekly acted, although Morwenna Banks’s receptionist rather steals this opening episode. There is little doubt about Coogan’s comedic skill. But his career sometimes reminds you of Robin Williams, another gifted comic actor who struggles to find vehicles for his talents. But the show may pick up as the series progresses, giving us a chance to rewrite history yet again.