Monarchy by David Starkey

Dr David Starkey presents a complete history of the British Monarchy.

(Edited highlights of the panel's review taken from the teletext subtitles that are generated live for Newsnight Review.)

IAN MCMILLAN:
I prefer him when he's opinionated, when he's on the radio, when he gets cross and then he gets you cross and thinking. On this he is like Uncle Dave or Mr Starkey the nice history teacher. I think why, in 2004, do we have to present history programmes like this? It's the same kind of TV we've all watched, we've all done -, where they go, "David, walk here to your mark, look over here, come behind the pillar, look over there, deliver that voiceover." Surely in 2004....

MARK LAWSON:
The thing is there was a 20-year period, where they didn't, it was lots of talking heads and then Sharma and Starkey brought back the illustrated lecture.

IAN MCMILLAN:
This is more than this. It has these odd school-type reconstructions where people look like they are out of fourth division boy bands with beards appear from nowhere. I would rather he got me cross or got me laughing. He just seems to walkabout. He walks from here to there and nothing seems to happen. It is a shame, he is a good historian. Maybe it works like this. This programme (Newsnight Review) works because it is four people on the sofa. Why alter it? Maybe you shouldn't alter it. I don't know.

MARK LAWSON:
I'm not sure that he's being as cosy as he appears to be. In a way he is being provocative and fantastically patriotic.

JOHN HARRIS:
There is a high Tory reading of English history here, which is that we are innately immune to dictatorship because we always understand the notion of rule by consent.

MARK LAWSON:
I think it will make a lot of people angry.

JOHN HARRIS:
It was a pretty rose-tinted view of English history. This is kind of old hat now. It's like going into a book shop and buying Fermat's Last Theorem and Longitude. It's got that sense of four years ago about it. It felt thin. How many overexposed candles can you cope with? This ersatz period music which is demonstrably made on a latter-day synthesizer which sounds like an English version of Clannad! Because there is no original material or talking heads in terms of footage, there is a point where the Norman Conquest is portrayed as a SeaFrance ferry docking in Dover. And when you run out of these modern totems you get David Starkey's Hush Puppies tramping over the marsh to show the march of time and at that point you think, "Are there really 18 episodes of this?"

MARK LAWSON:
Apart from the cross-Channel ferry, he is constantly using verbal analogies with the present day. The Saxon invasion, he says ethnic cleansing. Augustine is market testing Christianity. Did those parallels work?

SARAH CHURCHWELL:
Of course not.

MARK LAWSON:
I thought the ethnic cleansing one was powerful. 200,000 people coming into a population of two million.

SARAH CHURCHWELL:
He talks about the Normans trying to conquer the hearts and minds of the Saxons. They are glib and very facile analogies. It's one attempt to update this tired form is that he is trying to give it contemporary relevance, but the way you do that is with humour. It's terribly humourless, terribly portentous. Every word is overemphasised. I didn't realise what stentorian tones were until I listened to this.

MARK LAWSON:
I have to defend him. I have watched recently three episodes of Alan Titchmarsh's History of the British Isles and I am in therapy still.

JOHN HARRIS:
Poor you.

MARK LAWSON:
This was my therapy. When you see this you realise how greatly more intelligent this is.

SARAH CHURCHWELL:
It's very good. It's very informative.