Schama navigates history – and this time it’s personal
Simon Schama’s History of Now (BBC Two) is a very personal project, he explained in this opening episode of his three-part series. It is a history of the 20th century, and it turns out that Schama wasn’t simply following events like most of us – on television and radio and in the newspapers – but, for some of it, was actually there.
Young Simon was in the US in 1964, where he “saw first-hand the bitter struggle for civil rights”. He was in Prague in 1965 and “could feel the stirrings of democracy before the Soviet tanks invaded”. He’s Forrest Gump with a Cambridge degree. Should we brace ourselves for footage of Schama popping up, Zelig-like, in Pathé footage?
Worry not. This is a sober history, elegantly delivered, in which Schama speaks of his own experiences but manages not to make the programme all about him. In an interview last week, he revealed that the producers had to talk him into the personal reminiscences, which he had not intended to include in the script. For a public intellectual, Schama appears to have only a moderately-sized ego.
I remember a debate some years ago about whether or not Schama was dumbing down history. That idea sounds laughable now, set against the current TV landscape. And Schama’s job is not to present programmes in the style of dry academic lectures, but to communicate information and ideas with fluency, which is something he usually manages to do. A series can’t possibly cover every aspect of 20thcentury history and politics, so Schama has hit on two ways to approach his subject: by looking back over his own lifetime, and by focusing on the arts as a force for political change.
He begins with his birth, giving it a tinge of Midnight’s Children. “I came into the world to the soundtrack of history.” As V-2 rockets fell on Britain and the US bombed Dresden. Wandering through the wreckage of buildings as a child, Schama told us, “even then I understood a new kind of warfare had been unleashed on the world, and us defenceless civilians were its targets.”
In this first episode he explored democracy, fascism and communism through some of the century’s most famous works of art. So the Spanish Civil War was discussed via Picasso’s Guernica (“the most profound meditation on cruelty and grief and sorrow”) and George Orwell’s 1984. The Cold War was framed by the story of Boris Pasternak writing Doctor Zhivago, and the fascinating story of the CIA using the Vatican pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair to press copies of the novel into the hands of Russian visitors. And who happened to be at that World’s Fair? Simon Schama, of course! Albeit aged just 13, and oblivious to the Doctor Zhivago business.
Then it was on to Schama’s time as a student living in Czechoslovakia in the Sixties, where the freedom promised by the Prague Spring was brutally suppressed by the Warsaw Pact invasion. The artists featured here were The Plastic People of the Universe, a rock band whose arrest and trial for staging popular underground gigs partly motivated Václav Havel and others to produce Charter 77, which called on the regime to respect human rights. Surviving members of the band appeared in the programme, as did Orwell’s son and Pasternak’s grandson, adding more personal touches.
But the series is called Simon Schama’s History of Now, and the presenter pressed home the fact that the world is currently in a state of political turmoil with worrying echoes of the past. This was the point at which the programme turned into a passionate personal essay.
In a seemingly unscripted moment, Schama had tears in his eyes as he stood on the balcony where Havel greeted crowds during the 1989 Velvet Revolution, and spoke about the current situation in Ukraine.
“We cannot afford the liquidation of democracy in the name of politics as usual,” he said. The bogeymen here were Russia, China and Donald Trump. The programme included footage of the former US president declaring that he had won the 2020 election, and a clip of the “Two Minutes Hate” from Michael Radford’s film version of 1984 was likened by Schama to the “glee of hatred” he observed at Trump rallies.
And, at the end, a plea for us to care about all this stuff, not to “buy a new pair of sneakers and get on a plane to Ibiza and who gives a toss about it”. Although the people doing that are probably not sitting down to a serious documentary on BBC Two.
Simon Schama’s History of Now ★★★★