Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

No Thanks For The Memory

Was the winter of discontent really as bad as you remember it, or was it worse? Was the war a time of equality, trust and common cause? Or was every bombed building looted as each looked after their own?

And if things were not as you remember them, where did the memory come from?

We as a society perceive memory as money in the bank - the accumulation of greater and greater information just as in a capitalist society we place importance on the accumulation of greater and greater wealth.

Simon McBurney, Writer and Director

It's been argued that memory is not so much recollected as re-created; that social memory is remade by repetition and conversation.

We know memories leak like a sieve. They play false. They make the past a plaything of the present. But they also inform beliefs, shape politics and policy and create identities. So frail, but so necessary. In 'No Thanks for the Memory', the historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto asks how we can use memory well, whether forgetting is sometimes necessary to creativity and whether there are alternatives to our dependence on memory.

What would happen, for example, if the idea that the war encouraged a mood of collectivism which made possible the welfare state, turned out to be more historical myth than fact? Perhaps the myth has become more real than the fact. Perhaps, if we agree with the consequences of a belief, the truth of it doesn't matter.

Producer: Michael Blastland