I thought the field was pretty well covered by Simon Schama and his lovely A History of Britain (even though he wimped out on Richard III).
Then I tune into yet another Tudor history series: Six Wives. Okay. But then there’s another one: Elizabeth. And apparently yet another one is in the works that deals with all the monarchs since the Anglo-Saxons. And all of these are the creations of one David Starkey, historian. He’s every-friggin’-where.
Now, his programs are not particularly enthralling (and I speak as a Tudor history nut, so I have a high boredom threshold for this sort of thing). They tend to feature a lot of people, dressed in Tudor court dress, staring fixedly into the camera for several minutes on end as the plummy, somewhat haughty tones of Dr Starkey deliver a monologue on what this person is supposedly thinking or feeling.
It was done better by Schama, and it was done better, if you like that sort of thing, by the people who made Elizabeth R (Glenda Jackson) and The Six Wives of Henry VIII back in, like, 1971. You can’t beat a good dose of Shakespearian acting.
But apparently Dr Starkey is a very vocal and high-profile ‘consultant’ on all things monarchical in the UK. I would have thought that making the Middle Ages and the Tudor era your life’s work would kind of put you off the boring, lacklustre present set of Royals. And Googling him returns 312,000 hits. :eek:
But anyway, what’s with the sudden rash of Starkeys? Since when did history become a competitive sport? And is that accent and cravat for real?
Got to say I (plus my Chinese wife and 9-year old kid - so quite a wide audience cross-section) enjoyed Starkey’s Six Wives and Elizabeth. He strikes me as genuinely eccentric rather than a sham, both accent-wise, clothes-wise and enthusiasm-wise. The dramatic reconstructions are excuses for the camera to wander around the grounds of beautiful places like Hampton Court and some northern castles, so I don’t mind that either. It could become irritating, as could he, but I think the balance between the two (Starkey gassing) and Paltrow and Fiennes wannabes flouncing around with leather-bound volumes in hand reading The Faerie Queen while blokes in black tunics and black beards scheme in the background works rather well. I’ve certainly learned a bit.
I always found these bits unintentionally funny, like the producers veered into Blackadder territory and didn’t realise it. But hey, it’s far, far better than watching Big Brother or The Eurovision Song Contest.
I’m proud to say I’ve never seen BB, though the same cannot alas be claimed for Eurovision. Indeed, I seem to recall watching Buck’s Fizz and The Brotherhood of Man, and I remember as if it were yesterday watching Cliff Richard singing one of the most insipid songs ever written.
How did Schama (sounds like something from the International Phonetic Alphabet) wimp out on Richard III? Refused to concede his resemblance to Peter Cook?
Schama just skipped over Tricky Dickie completely. Thereby avoiding the “was he evil/was he good” controversy. Very clever of him.
And… you’re the historian. Which is it?!
I find RIII oddly fascinating. I don’t think he was as bad as is commonly supposed. Did he order the murder of his nephews? Who knows. Will we ever know? Prob’ly not. So all the history nuts can theorise to their little hearts content.
I’m waiting for the poster Anne Neville to turn up in this thread…I’m betting she’s a major Ricardian. 
The short answer is that in the late 1990s British TV companies realised that good quality history documentaries can be incredibly popular. This was not just the BBC but also their main rival in the field, Channel 4. The result has been one of the most commented-upon trends in television in Britain in recent years.
Schama’s History of Britain was both the most high-profile consequence of that new fashion and the major reason why the fashion has endured. Channel 4 then deliberately set up Starkey as their alternative to Schama. But Starkey was not new to television - he had been appearing in documentaries on and off since the 1970s and, as such, had more TV experience than Schama. Moreover, Channel 4 got him to do the first in their sequence of Tudor documentaries when Schama’s project was only at the planning stage.
What is more, Starkey’s Elizabeth series was a huge hit in Britain. At the time it was Channel 4’s top-rating programme. Channel 4 responded by giving Starkey a multi-million contract which grabbed headlines because (depending on how you did the calculations) it made him the highest paid presenter on British TV. Which looked a good deal at the time as history programmes had proved their popularity and, with Schama concentrating on other things, Starkey clearly was the doyen of the glut of new TV dons.
That they then got him to do a big, ambitious overview of the British monarchy was a bit of a no-brainer. He had done all the Tudor monarchs already which meant that they needed something much broader and he is as capable of doing such an overview as anyone. That was the theory.
IMHO, the fact that the first series has been disappointing was because it was too similar to the comparable Schama programmes, which, dare one say it, weren’t themselves that good either. The best of the Schama programmes were the later ones, when he realised that there was little point in attempting a conventional narrative and that more thematic, more idiosyncratic film essays worked better.
The use of dramatised reconstructions is now simply the norm in all British historical documentaries, whatever the production company, whoever the presenter. Nothing to do with Starkey specifically or his production company.
As for Richard III, I doubt Starkey will duck the issue. He’s always been more than happy to say that he thinks Richard was guilty and, unlike Schama, it is ‘his period’.
The big question is, when will they let nutty Paul Johnson loose on our TV screens?