I love Lucy’s timely style
FOR an awful moment or two last night, I thought TV historian Lucy Worsley was going to get herself arrested. For storming Parliament perhaps or lobbing bricks through shop windows, torching buildings or, at the very least, chaining herself to the nearest convenient set of railings.
After all, we know what she’s like. Whatever period of history a Lucy Worsley programme happens to be bringing to life, she can’t just sit back and observe or interview some cobwebby old professor.
No, she has to get involved, kitting herself out in period clobber so she can transport herself back in time and step into each scene, mingling with the characters, giving herself a walk-on role in their story. “Don’t mind me,” she’s effectively telling these presumably somewhat baffled souls, “I’m just a mildly eccentric lady from the future, making one of my popular history shows for the BBC.”
Her latest, SUFFRAGETTES WITH LUCY WORSLEY (BBC1), was a fabulous example of such programme-making: immersive, informative, emotionally engaging. Lucy hung out with pivotal figures from the 1910s, most famously the Pankhursts – Emmeline and her daughters, Sylvia and Christabel – as they and their fellow activists from the Women’s Social and Political Union fought tooth, nail and a whole lot more for a cause in which they believed with every fibre of their being: for women to be granted the vote.
Yes, all right, these were modernday actors, I’m not a complete idiot. But the words they spoke were real enough, taken from the suffragettes’ diaries. As their story unfolded and their mounting frustration drove them to ever more desperate, violent measures, those words left us in no doubt as to how far they’d be prepared to go to see this through.
The accounts of the suffragettes’ hunger strikes and force-feeding to which these prisoners were subjected, were particularly harrowing. Likewise the brutal treatment of protesters on what became known as Black Friday.
Not everyone, I know, is a fan of Lucy Worsley’s style of programmemaking. Sniffier types consider it a little infantile, a bit Blue Peter.
But more conventional history programmes, let’s not forget, are often tucked away or given a low profile, whereas Lucy’s secured a 90-minute prime-time slot on mainstream TV for one of the most important stories in our history, served up straight after EastEnders. It’s hard to argue with that.
Besides, it was nowhere near as dumbed down as THE QUEEN’S CORONATION IN COLOUR (ITV). As a rule I adore this kind of stuff, and there are few TV chaps more likeable than its presenter, Alexander Armstrong. But I fear we’re becoming over familiar with much of this royal archive footage, as well as the associated anecdotes.
And, oh dear, Alexander presented the whole thing in that slightly-too-jolly voice he sometimes adopts. You know, the one he uses on Pointless when straining to convince a contestant that they haven’t been a dimwit.
Also, his use of the word “we” was a bit odd. “It was as if we, the viewers, were in Westminster Abbey,” he remarked of the Coronation’s groundbreaking TV coverage.
Alexander, mate, this was 65 years ago. You weren’t even born.
Lucy Worsley, of course, was the third maid of honour from the left.