Diary – 27 June 2019

I spent the early part of last week in London, filming what are known in the television trade as PTCs (‘pieces to camera’). These will form the connecting tissue for a three-part documentary series loosely based on my most recent book, The Square and the Tower. Ten years ago, I did a lot of this kind of thing. A series of books, beginning with Empire, started life as television scripts, in an effort on my part to bring history to a wider audience. (The effort was quite successful but earned me the disdain of a certain kind of academic prig.) In those days, PTCs were delivered on location, and the more exotic the better — I have an especially stomach-turning memory of dangling from a helicopter over the Victoria Falls. This new series, however, is about networks, not empires, and there’s only so much you can do visually with the blandness of Silicon Valley.