\u201cThe Radio Times was the grand publication of my youth,\u201d says historian and broadcaster Simon Schama. \u201cIt was also our gentle instructor on how to prioritise our viewing, what we\u2019d want to watch. It would be unthinkable not to have it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Schama is looking back across seven decades to a time when one weekly magazine was at the heart of his life. \u201cIt was our family diary and the absolute bible for our entertainment.\u201d<\/p>\n
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<\/a>.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n From our armchairs and sofas, we have experienced, variously, Moon landings, the coming of The Beatles and a world war \u2013 all of which have made the cover of RT.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s very difficult to bend one\u2019s mind around what these events would have been without television and radio,\u201d Schama says. \u201cBut it\u2019s a tribute to broadcasting that thinking about these events without those images coming to mind is impossible.\u201d<\/p>\n You might say Schama\u2019s has been a Radio Times life. His 2000 series A History of Britain, one of the few that deserves the \u201clandmark\u201d epithet, announced him as British television\u2019s leading cultural historian, and its second season made the front cover of our 5th May 2001 edition.<\/p>\n 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. \u201cI had small children, I was an academic, but then I remembered my dad, who loved the BBC, and who said, \u2018You always regret what you don\u2019t do.’\u201d<\/p>\n Making the series changed his life mid-course. \u201cWhen I\u2019m in Britain, almost not a day goes past when, undeservedly, someone comes up and thanks me \u2013 cabbies, people in the queue at the supermarket. That is extremely moving, it\u2019s an honour knowing your time on the planet isn\u2019t entirely wasted.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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: \u201cIn 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.\u201d<\/p>\n From then on, almost everything that mattered was filtered through television. The stirrings of adolescence began, as it did for so many of Schama\u2019s generation, with rock \u2018n\u2019 roll.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cplenty of music, in the modern manner, with rock \u2018n\u2019 roll, skiffle groups, traditional jazz\u201d.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cIt had a direct effect on popular culture,\u201d Schama says. \u201cThere were kids like me dancing, it was fantastic.\u201d In a rather sniffy submission to the new times, Six-Five Special received the following, brief, RT cover mention, described as \u201cthe first of the new television programmes bridging the gap between six and seven o\u2019clock\u201d. Which was technically correct, if hardly illuminating.<\/p>\n \u201cThere was,\u201d says Schama, \u201can air of starchiness about the Radio Times.\u201d And like the BBC, RT could be very solemn.<\/p>\n \u201cI was born in 1945, so I\u2019m 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.<\/p>\n \u201cBut 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.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Previously untouchable pillars of the establishment, including politicians and the BBC itself, were openly and shockingly mocked. \u201cWhoever said yes to Ned Sherrin was very, very important. That was a real gateway moment in the history of broadcasting.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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, \u201ca fantastic break-up of ceremonious strength\u201d.<\/p>\n From now on, if the BBC was going to be serious, it was because the subject matter was serious rather than the corporation\u2019s tone, and there were epochal television moments ahead. \u201cThe Moon landing is a very good example, millions upon millions upon millions of people watched that,\u201d says Schama of an event that made a memorable RT cover.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s own Life on Earth had, and still have, a huge effect on our culture.<\/p>\n \u201cThose things are instrumental to forming a generation, to expanding knowledge. Television has the responsibility of making education not frightening \u2013 watching something and not having to take an exam at the end of it \u2013 yet it\u2019s something that, nonetheless, will enrich you and just reshape you.<\/p>\n \u201cThe 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 \u2013 that has all naturally grown out of a kind of enabling power, the enchantment, almost, of really strong broadcasting.\u201d<\/p>\n In that sense, the BBC, and broadcasting more widely, has \u2013 for all the fluff that makes its way into the schedules \u2013 emerged as the defender of a particularly democratic idea of learning. It\u2019s a position that has made enemies, reckons Schama.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you work in television or the media, if you\u2019re in the BBC, God knows you are facing, you know, next Tuesday\u2019s remarks from the Daily Mail. There is this inner snark built into the culture. Sometimes it\u2019s good, creative snark, but it\u2019s built-in.<\/p>\n \u201cThen, 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, \u2018Do you believe in abolishing the licence fee? Do you believe in letting the BBC just be another commercial channel?\u2019 the overwhelming majority of people would still say no.\u201d<\/p>\n The British, he says, will always be ready to hear a good story. \u201cI think what\u2019s very strongly rooted in Britain through things like David Attenborough\u2019s amazing series \u2013 his whole life, really \u2013 is the ability to fuse seamlessly, marry seamlessly, opinion with storytelling. And David is an incredible storyteller.\u201d<\/p>\n The example wasn\u2019t wasted on Schama when he made A History of Britain. \u201cI\u2019m 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Perhaps feeding that hunger is television\u2019s great triumph, and Schama\u2019s. 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\u2019s rightful inheritance is the real mark of the Radio Times century. Will there be another 100 years like this?<\/p>\n \u201cI think we have to fight for it,\u201d says Schama. \u201cBroadcasters themselves, and probably Radio Times. What I don\u2019t like to see at the BBC is the kind of penitential defensiveness. When something has gone terrifyingly wrong, then you have to \u2018fess up and do what you can, but I\u2019m a determined champion of everything that\u2019s really unique about the BBC and I feel lucky to still be making new series.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m a very, very lucky boy, and I have been for a long time. Though, as the great Alex Ferguson said, \u2018You earn your luck.’\u201d<\/p>\n If you\u2019re looking for more to watch, check out our <\/strong>TV Guide<\/a> and Streaming Guide<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n Try Radio Times magazine today and get 10 issues for only \u00a310, PLUS a \u00a310 John Lewis and Partners voucher delivered to your home \u2013 subscribe now<\/a>. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p> <\/body><\/html>\n The historian talks That Was The Week That Was, Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation and A History of Britain. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":37107,"template":"","categories":[1,5],"acf":[],"uagb_featured_image_src":{"full":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/56\/2023\/09\/simon-schama-explains-the-important-part-radio-times-has-played-in-tv-and-radio-over-100-years-scaled.jpg",2560,1707,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/56\/2023\/09\/simon-schama-explains-the-important-part-radio-times-has-played-in-tv-and-radio-over-100-years-150x150.jpg",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/56\/2023\/09\/simon-schama-explains-the-important-part-radio-times-has-played-in-tv-and-radio-over-100-years-300x200.jpg",300,200,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/56\/2023\/09\/simon-schama-explains-the-important-part-radio-times-has-played-in-tv-and-radio-over-100-years-768x512.jpg",768,512,true],"large":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/56\/2023\/09\/simon-schama-explains-the-important-part-radio-times-has-played-in-tv-and-radio-over-100-years-1024x683.jpg",800,534,true],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/56\/2023\/09\/simon-schama-explains-the-important-part-radio-times-has-played-in-tv-and-radio-over-100-years-1536x1024.jpg",1536,1024,true],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/56\/2023\/09\/simon-schama-explains-the-important-part-radio-times-has-played-in-tv-and-radio-over-100-years-2048x1365.jpg",2048,1365,true]},"uagb_author_info":{"display_name":"importmanagerhub@sprylab.com","author_link":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/radiotimes\/author\/importmanagerhubsprylab-com\/"},"uagb_comment_info":0,"uagb_excerpt":"The historian talks That Was The Week That Was, Queen Elizabeth II's coronation and A History of Britain.","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/radiotimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rss_feed\/37106"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/radiotimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rss_feed"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/radiotimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/rss_feed"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/radiotimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/radiotimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/37107"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/radiotimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37106"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/radiotimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Simon](\"https:\/\/images.immediate.co.uk\/production\/volatile\/sites\/3\/2023\/09\/GettyImages-467177726-7175618.jpg?quality=90&resize=620%2C413\" "\\"Simon")
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