TV dramas turn history into parade of Tudors and Nazis, says professor

COSTUME dramas trivialise history and “sensationalist” teaching means the Tudors and the Nazis are over-emphasised, a Cambridge professor has claimed.

The influence of popular culture has led to an “excessive” focus on these topics at school, according to Prof Robert Tombs, a history fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge.

Writing for a publication titled The State, National Identity and Schools, he said that history was often “falsified” to make it more interesting – but this could be confusing for children.

“The conventional – and excessive – concentration of school history teaching on the Tudors and the Third Reich would seem to show how formal historical teaching is influenced by the sensationalising tendencies of popular culture,” he said.

Prof Tombs said there are some positive effects of popularising history, noting that interest in the discipline among both children and adults can be “stimulated” by visiting a historic site or a museum. But he added that there are “potential disadvantages” to this as well. “Perhaps most fundamentally, a commercially driven trivialisation and falsification of the past as a vast theme park or costume drama is a barrier against that attempt to understand past cultures and societies which is the essential aim of all historical study,” he said. “Instead, we have anachronism papered over with surface detail.”

He also warned of teachers who use Blackadder and Horrible Histories as teaching materials, since these provide “undemanding” classroom aides.

Prof Tombs’s essay is published today by the think tank Politeia.