The historian talks That Was The Week That Was, Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation and A History of Britain.
This interview was originally published in Radio Times magazine.
“The Radio Times was the grand publication of my youth,” says historian and broadcaster Simon Schama. “It was also our gentle instructor on how to prioritise our viewing, what we’d want to watch. It would be unthinkable not to have it.”
Schama is looking back across seven decades to a time when one weekly magazine was at the heart of his life. “It was our family diary and the absolute bible for our entertainment.”
The 78-year-old has just returned to the New York home he shares with his wife, genetics professor Virginia Papaioannou, for the start of the academic year (Schama is a professor of art history and history at Columbia University), but gladly found time to mark what for him is a significant moment, personally and historically: 100 years of Radio Times.
It has been a remarkable century. For the first time in history, all Britons, of every social class and religious or ethnic background, have been able to directly witness the great events and social upheavals that set the course of their lives.
From our armchairs and sofas, we have experienced, variously, Moon landings, the coming of The Beatles and a world war – all of which have made the cover of RT.
“It’s very difficult to bend one’s mind around what these events would have been without television and radio,” Schama says. “But it’s a tribute to broadcasting that thinking about these events without those images coming to mind is impossible.”
You might say Schama’s has been a Radio Times life. His 2000 series A History of Britain, one of the few that deserves the “landmark” epithet, announced him as British television’s leading cultural historian, and its second season made the front cover of our 5th May 2001 edition.
Up until then, Schama had been a well-regarded academic who had made the occasional foray into broadcasting, but he had resisted the siren call of a major BBC series. “I had small children, I was an academic, but then I remembered my dad, who loved the BBC, and who said, ‘You always regret what you don’t do.’”
Making the series changed his life mid-course. “When I’m in Britain, almost not a day goes past when, undeservedly, someone comes up and thanks me – cabbies, people in the queue at the supermarket. That is extremely moving, it’s an honour knowing your time on the planet isn’t entirely wasted.”
Schama was only three months old when an RT cover marked the end of the Second World War in Europe with a week of Victory Programmes.
When he was eight, in 1953, it was the Coronation issue on the coffee table of the family home, marking perhaps the defining British television event of the 20th century, and one he still recalls: “In our house we had a little nine-inch Ekco television, which came with a plastic magnifier to strap on with rubber bands to the front of the set, and all the neighbours were in the room.”
From then on, almost everything that mattered was filtered through television. The stirrings of adolescence began, as it did for so many of Schama’s generation, with rock ‘n’ roll.
The first episode of Six-Five Special, precursor of all rock and pop television shows that would follow, went out on the evening of Saturday 16th February 1957. It was billed in Radio Times as offering “plenty of music, in the modern manner, with rock ‘n’ roll, skiffle groups, traditional jazz”.
Uptight when it should have been swinging, Six-Five Special bore all the marks of BBC mandarins attempting to understand matters beyond their ken, but it was a start. And 12 million people were watching.
“It had a direct effect on popular culture,” Schama says. “There were kids like me dancing, it was fantastic.” In a rather sniffy submission to the new times, Six-Five Special received the following, brief, RT cover mention, described as “the first of the new television programmes bridging the gap between six and seven o’clock”. Which was technically correct, if hardly illuminating.
“There was,” says Schama, “an air of starchiness about the Radio Times.” And like the BBC, RT could be very solemn.
“I was born in 1945, so I’m not quite 100 years old, but it feels like it sometimes. So, I grew up with Richard Dimbleby and what was a very, very Reithian BBC. And it was very solidly ceremonious, with Uncle and Auntie figures both on radio and television. I remember those voices well.
“But when I was in my teens and the 1960s got under way, something happened to all of us. There was kind of the opposite effect, a fantastic poking of the institutional eye. That happened on BBC television with That Was The Week That Was, which was revolutionary, an amazing breakthrough. Just talking about TWTWTW, it comes back to me so immediately and powerfully.”
Created by Ned Sherrin and starring David Frost and Millicent Martin, comedy revue TWTWTW was part of a swirl of social change christened the Satire Boom, including the Beyond the Fringe stage show and the launching of Private Eye magazine.
Previously untouchable pillars of the establishment, including politicians and the BBC itself, were openly and shockingly mocked. “Whoever said yes to Ned Sherrin was very, very important. That was a real gateway moment in the history of broadcasting.”
It taught the young Schama, then setting off on his own academic career, a life-changing lesson: hierarchy was not immutable. The point was emphasised by an iconic 1963 RT cover that marked the second series of TWTWTW.
A cocky young Frost, with pencil-thin tie and close-cut suit, pokes a finger out of the picture, as if to say: wake up Britain, all is changed. In the same year, The Beatles were RT cover stars. Schama and the country were witnessing, he says, “a fantastic break-up of ceremonious strength”.
From now on, if the BBC was going to be serious, it was because the subject matter was serious rather than the corporation’s tone, and there were epochal television moments ahead. “The Moon landing is a very good example, millions upon millions upon millions of people watched that,” says Schama of an event that made a memorable RT cover.
Far fewer people watched Civilisation, a history of Western art presented by Kenneth Clark and commissioned by BBC2 controller David Attenborough, but Schama argues that series such as Civilisation and Attenborough’s own Life on Earth had, and still have, a huge effect on our culture.
“Those things are instrumental to forming a generation, to expanding knowledge. Television has the responsibility of making education not frightening – watching something and not having to take an exam at the end of it – yet it’s something that, nonetheless, will enrich you and just reshape you.
“The great boom in the past 20, 30, 40 years in the numbers of people visiting art galleries, buying history books and thinking about history, the great success of podcasts – that has all naturally grown out of a kind of enabling power, the enchantment, almost, of really strong broadcasting.”
In that sense, the BBC, and broadcasting more widely, has – for all the fluff that makes its way into the schedules – emerged as the defender of a particularly democratic idea of learning. It’s a position that has made enemies, reckons Schama.
“If you work in television or the media, if you’re in the BBC, God knows you are facing, you know, next Tuesday’s remarks from the Daily Mail. There is this inner snark built into the culture. Sometimes it’s good, creative snark, but it’s built-in.
“Then, when it comes to big genuine national crises [like the Covid pandemic], I think that falls away. If you had an opinion poll tomorrow, asking, ‘Do you believe in abolishing the licence fee? Do you believe in letting the BBC just be another commercial channel?’ the overwhelming majority of people would still say no.”
The British, he says, will always be ready to hear a good story. “I think what’s very strongly rooted in Britain through things like David Attenborough’s amazing series – his whole life, really – is the ability to fuse seamlessly, marry seamlessly, opinion with storytelling. And David is an incredible storyteller.”
The example wasn’t wasted on Schama when he made A History of Britain. “I’m no medieval historian and I had this strong sense that I would have a lot of learning on the job to do. But I thought, honestly, at a time when everything was fly-on-the-wall television, there was a real hunger out there for exactly the sort of thing that David was doing as well, for television that educates us by telling stories.”
Perhaps feeding that hunger is television’s great triumph, and Schama’s. Yes, we have had coronations, great sporting occasions, starry moments and epic drama series, but to have kept culture and science, learning and wonder on our screens as everyone’s rightful inheritance is the real mark of the Radio Times century. Will there be another 100 years like this?
“I think we have to fight for it,” says Schama. “Broadcasters themselves, and probably Radio Times. What I don’t like to see at the BBC is the kind of penitential defensiveness. When something has gone terrifyingly wrong, then you have to ‘fess up and do what you can, but I’m a determined champion of everything that’s really unique about the BBC and I feel lucky to still be making new series.
“I’m a very, very lucky boy, and I have been for a long time. Though, as the great Alex Ferguson said, ‘You earn your luck.’”
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