Last night on television Jasper Rees The myth-busting’s great but let’s ditch the play-act
Fibs is a very Lucy Worsley word. It speaks of the naughty step, the wagged finger of the tutting schoolmarm. In American History’s Biggest Fibs with Lucy Worsley (BBC Four) it’s as if Worsley makes the United States go and stand in the corner for having told a series of mythopoeic pork pies about its past.
In this first episode of the new three-part series, following on from 2017’s British History’s Biggest Fibs, Worsley performed an eye-opening demolition of America’s founding myths as she examined the American Revolution. The national habit of, in her savage gerund, “supersizing the truth” invited us to think again about the Boston Tea Party, gun laws, the sounding of the Liberty Bell, the Statue of Liberty originally destined for Egypt and George Washington’s attitude to his slaves. This was the often fascinating story of a country puffing out its chest and making up its own history as it went along.
I sometimes wonder whether she hasn’t managed to trap herself inside a brand of her own creation. In her encounters with other historians you see the sensible grown-up on her best behaviour. Strip out the unabashed play-acting and the actual history was quite bracing. Indeed the complexity of the ideas in play was sufficiently niche to keep it from Worsley’s regular patch on BBC Two.
However, she presents in the key of Marmite. She is faithfully adored by legions, but I confess to finding her winks and purrs and frowny faces quite close to unstomachable. As she moves onto foreign territory there is the risk that Worsley’s approach may stray from harmless japery into flat-out misfire.
However irritating, her credo that storytelling is best served with assistance from the wardrobe mistress – that you wear what you tell – had an acceptable logic in her visits to Tudor or Georgian England. Here we got her in the stars and stripes and the yellow livery of a twirling majorette. The image of Worsley grunting and gurning in the guise of a padded and helmeted quarterback was a new low, even for her.
At least we were spared the sight of her got up as a Mohawk. Here’s hoping that in future episodes her choice of outfits for the Civil War and the Cold War are sensitive and appropriate.
Last month the BBC screened Care, a drama about the state’s failing provision for dementia sufferers. Its author Jimmy Mcgovern reserved his largest lashing of sarcasm for the NHS job title known as a “discharge liaison officer”. In the latest edition of (BBC Two) there was a key role for someone working as a discharge planner. Same job, nearly the same job title, but this was a more generous treatment.
Hospital is now into the fourth series of what is becoming a long-term collaboration between the UK’S two most renowned institutions, each beloved but struggling to match the expectations placed upon them. The BBC’S ongoing X-ray of the NHS has brought it to Liverpool, where the same old narratives are in play: masses of strain on the system and its indispensable staff, one of whom will turn to the camera, as they did here, and say, “Today is the worst I’ve seen it.”
It’s the task of Hospital to veer between light and dark, but mostly the narrative is about muddling between those two poles. Thus the discharge planner at the Walton Centre in Liverpool was to find a private residence for Tom, an 18-yearold who suffered a brain injury in a car crash and had become a bedblocker through no fault of his own. He was desperate to get out of hospital but couldn’t remember why he had to stay: his angry efforts to escape were edited together to make a succinct illustration of his short-term memory failure.
Tom’s story was told alongside that of Sophie, another young person with nothing visibly wrong with her but who, thanks to an inflammatory episode on her brainstem, was only ever a few minutes away from possible death. There was much talk of pathways and patient journeys and, like others, this episode worked hard to reach positive destinations – Sophie’s rediscovery of her voice with the help of technical wizardry was a particular joy.
I wonder how many stories get culled in the edit because the outcome is neither light nor dark but just more waiting, more grey days without a destination in view?
American History’s Biggest Fibs with Lucy Worsley ★★★ Hospital ★★★