Must all history programming be ‘relevant’?

When it comes to history programming, television’s loss is increasingly audio’s gain. People moan to me most weeks over the lack of really good, rigorous, eye-opening documentaries on the screen, and I can only nod along in agreement. Oh for a Kenneth Clark-style lecture! More Michael Wood! There’s an especially strong appetite for the adventurous commissions of the 1990s and 2000s. It’s principally podcasts, now, that are pouring into this void.

Stephen Fry’s Edwardian Secrets, a 12-episode sequel to his previous series on the Victorians, even sounds like an extended BBC4 documentary, replete with talking heads, choral background music and just a dash of Horrible Histories. Unfortunately, it also suffers from the malady of much modern history-making, with its explicit emphasis on ‘relevance’. In the first episode, we are assured that ‘our concerns’ about fake news, black lives and the status of women were also very pressing in the Edwardian era. Heaven forfend that there should be a period exhibiting no parallels with the 21st century whatsoever.

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How self-centred it’s all become. Must all history cater to taste? The assumption that something isn’t worth hearing unless we can instantly recognise ourselves in it seems to me unfounded. A veiled trigger warning for ‘scenes of excess’ in one of Fry’s episodes left me similarly bemused. Since when did a bit of theatrical panting offend anyone?

The panter transpired to be none other than Edward VII: Dirty Bertie, Edward the Caresser, Tum-Tum — the fat king with the custom-made sex chair. ‘You must either belong to the good, or to the bad in this life,’ his father, Prince Albert, once wrote to him. Bertie’s own view was rather ‘Nobody is always good’. The tutor who described his young charge as ‘very passionate’ in the classroom on account of his hurling of furniture spoke only too presciently.