Sphinx

There’s a familiar idea that Thucydides might be considered the founding figure for journalism – rooting out the truth of contemporary news events through own observations and interviewing eye-witnesses – and perhaps especially war reporting. There is perhaps an even better case for discerning his spirit in the classic tv history documentary format: ‘what he saw himself’ represented by archive footage, supplemented by plenty of interviews with participants looking back on events, all tied together by a portentous narrator (can’t you just hear Larry ‘World At War’ Olivier reading Thucydides?) – and, to a far greater degree than in actual war reporting, a huge amount of selection, evaluation and artful arrangement of material going on beneath the surface in order to produce a seamless, true-seeming narrative.

Thucydides the documentary-maker then has one clear advantage over his modern successors: he clearly recognises that his approach doesn’t work if you go too far back in time. The differences between his accounts of recent events and of the more distant past are very familiar; not just his acknowledgement of the limits of knowledge of the latter, the need to rely on plausible reconstruction and rational critique, but also the way it’s presented – no pretence that we can have the words of Agamemnon or Themistocles in any form, an outline of events that is unmistakably theoretical rather than ‘real’.

Modern documentary makers are much more reluctant to abandon their familiar methods, perhaps nervous that their audience won’t otherwise accept their accounts as trustworthy. Eyewitness interviews are replaced by archive footage as participants are increasingly likely to have died (with the added advantage that they can’t change their stories; one of the striking thing about the recent Fight The Power series on the history of hip hop, which prompted some of these thoughts, is how far artists and a couple of journalists and academics get to look back in interview segments, while politicians and other hip-hop-hostile authority figures appear only as archive footage even when they’re still alive). Go back further, and the lack of archive footage of events has to be supplemented not just by still images (photographs, then paintings), but also by re-enactments. For contemporary accounts, instead of interviews there are written sources, to be brought to life by actors reading them over suitable footage, or more recently by actors pretending to be the speakers…

I blame Alan Bennett. Once upon a time, ‘talking heads’ were real people, appearing as themselves to pontificate about stuff they allegedly knew about, in news programmes or documentaries. To the point of cliché, undoubtedly; we’re all familiar – for values of ‘we’ that are over 40 and have watched a lot of BBC programmes, anyway – with the visual style of cutting between shots of landscapes or buildings or objects with voiceover or heroic presenter, and shots of ‘expert’ in a library or office pronouncing expertly about it. And if, as an academic, you got an email from a producer saying, hi, we’re going a series about Rome with talking heads and would really like to talk to you… you knew they were holding out the possibility that you’d get to put on a tweed jacket and appear on Actual Television if you give them lots of your time and expertise without asking awkward questions about fees.

Then in 1988 along came Alan’s Talking Heads. Maggie Smith, Julie Walters, Thora Hird, any number of authoritative figures talking powerfully and persuasively about human experience – but not actually their own, or real, experience. And ever since, it’s increasingly likely that a chat about ‘a programme on the fall of the Republic with talking heads’ will mean an awkward discussion of the fact that, no, we don’t actually have any of the words of e.g. Crassus to use in the script.

The problems with this are obvious. The first is the familiar issue of elitism, that the further we go back in time, the more the only words we have to draw upon are those of a tiny group of unrepresentative figures, or indeed just a lot of Cicero (certainly if we want a traditional political military Caesar: A Warning From History narrative; actually there would be a bigger variety of potential voices in a programme about everyday life). The second is a reluctance to accept that there’s any issue here, to recognise that either you have to abandon this style of presentation or you have to admit that you are producing a historical fiction, and embrace the opportunities this offers to do something different.

Perhaps because the actual work of historical interpretation goes on entirely behind the scenes in most documentaries, historical authority becomes vested in the style of presentation – the all-knowing presenter, but still more these days the trappings of modern documentary style even when this simply doesn’t work for more ancient material. It’s almost ritualistic: if we imitate the conventional format of documentaries on recent history, we will produce something historical, or at least that our audience will recognise as historical.

I don’t know if the disappearance of the old-fashioned academic talking head is just a matter of fashion, or driven by a sense that they make things seem less ‘historical’ because they reveal more of the workings behind the scenes, the construction of ‘historical truth’ and the necessity of choosing between competing interpretations. Or maybe we’re just more expensive and/or more difficult to deal with than actors. There is still a ritual consultation of academics in the research stage – but it’s not at all obvious how one is supposed to offer academic input into the question of how to write Crassus’ lines, other than questioning the entire enterprise. Which would explain why they never even sent a follow-up ‘thank you’ email, I guess.

I can imagine so many ways in which one might bring the past to life on television, with a bit of imagination and a willingness to imagine an intelligent audience who might be persuaded to take an interest in how we know as well as what we (supposedly) know. Above all, I would dearly love someone to do a The Day Today take on historical documentaries – pushing the cliches of the form, its taken-for-granted visual grammar and rhetoric, to the point of surreal absurdity. Yes, there was that early Marcus Brigstocke We Are History series, but that was too (deliberately) amateurish, too focused on making the presenter a comic character.; it was largely about his failure to achieve the intended form on a limited budget, not the flaws of the form itself. Which isn’t a pointless exercise, but it actually reinforces the dominance of the form it was echoing…