A History of Britain, Discs 4 and 5

Now I’ve finished watching Simon Schama’s BBC series, A History of Britain. The episodes on Disc 4 cover the years from William and Mary to the Regency, George IV and William IV. (The latter get short shrift.) In the earlier part of the century, the Jacobite rebellion which attempted to install Bonnie Prince Charlie as King in lieu of the Hanoverian George I is shown, with the conclusion that its failure may actually have ended up improving the lot of the Scots. The American and French Revolutions, and how Britain dealt with the former and avoided a replay of the latter figure largely in the history of the later part of the 18th century. Schama discusses William Wordsworth’s journey from radical to Romantic at some length, and of course, also deals with the Napoleonic Wars.

The final disc contains three episodes which take Schama’s history from Victoria through Winston Churchill. As in the preceding episodes, we see Schama’s belief that an excessive emphasis on trade and business compromised British ideals of liberty, particularly during the glory days of Empire. Heartrending photographs of Indians who starved to death as Victoria was being made Empress of India illustrate his point all too well. Oddly, he seems to skim over both the Boer War and World War I with very little discussion.

In some ways I felt that the final episode, The Two Winstons, was the best of all. One of the strengths of Schama’s work is its interdisciplinary focus, and in The Two Winstons he allows himself to emphasize that focus. The first Winston is, of course, Winston Churchill; the second is Winston Smith, the hero of George Orwell’s 1984, and by extension, Orwell (Eric Blair) himself. Comparing Churchill’s life and that of Blair/Orwell gives Schama an opportunity to tell the history of Britain in the first half of the 20th century in a fresh new way. (Churchill’s participation as first a cabinet member and then an officer in the trenches of France is pretty much the only mention of WWI). I also learned something that I don’t think I’d heard before – that when Churchill became Prime Minister in 1940, the members of the Cabinet were very close to trying to negotiate some kind of peace with Hitler – a terrifying thought. As usual with television histories of this type, my appetite for reading a bit more history has been whetted; I own at least the first volume of Schama’s companion history and will probably be dipping into it before long.

A History of Britain (Disc 3)

Ever since childhood days in Connecticut, watching New York channels 11 (I think – it was sponsored by the school system or education department) and 13 (WNET, PBS before there was PBS), I’ve had a nagging fondness for “educational television.” So from time to time I sample some on DVD. I like a varied diet of film, so it’s quite a while since I watched Discs 1 and 2 of Simon Schama’s series. Disc 3 includes The Body of the Queen, the last episode of season 1, plus The British Wars and Revolutions, the first two in season 2.

A History of Britain (2000 and after) is a good, and reasonably entertaining, introduction to British history, mingling Schama’s visits to famous places with reenactments and artifacts from the period to keep the viewer interested. Occasionally the reenactments were so realistic that I had to close my eyes. And then there were the times that my eyes closed on their own. To be fair, that was partly physiological and partly because, having taken an excellent course on Tudor and Stuart history, there was little new information for me in these particular episodes, which span the period from Elizabeth I to William and Mary. I do enjoy seeing the places where things happened. And the music that accompanies the series is lovely and haunting. I’ll be watching the rest of the episodes some time in the not-too-distant future.