Let’s hear it for The Rest is History
Last year I painted the garden shed while Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook followed me round talking about the Battle of Cape St Vincent. It took me three hours to finish the shed and Nelson slightly longer to finish the Spanish.
Huzzah for The Rest is History, today (5 December) crowned Apple’s podcast of the year. The world’s greatest history podcast – five years, over 600 shows, millions of downloads, best-selling books, British Academy Medal and a world tour with T-shirts, Sandbrook and Holland run a master class in how to make history rock. Granddaughter Rosa started Sandbrook’s Adventures in Time history of Nelson wanting to go to sea (she’s eight). She finished it below decks at Trafalgar utterly bereaved and still wanting to go to sea.
No one saw it coming, and no one quite knows how it happened. One thing is for sure however, The Rest is History tells you stuff – loads of stuff, the sort of stuff I don’t remember being told by anybody else. I don’t know how long they can keep it up, but these guys are the history publishing phenomenon of my lifetime.
University seminars talked a lot about theories and interpretations, structures and systems, but hardly at all and never sympathetically about history’s great personal encounters, moral obsessions, friendships and battleships, its changes of heart and mind. My Sussex tutors were good at close quarter wrangling where they hardened you up for life over the wall. They even taught a core module called Concepts Methods and Values in the Social Sciences, which liberated those of us who didn’t know what all that meant. But nuggety life stories about Manny Shinwell on the waterfront, say, or Marie Antionette stepping on the executioner’s foot (“Pardonnez-moi monsieur. Je ne l’ai pas fait exprés”), or the enslavement of Olaudah Equiano (whose “Interesting Narrative” was found on John Wesley’s deathbed), we were not taught.
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This is not to speak in favour of story over analysis. Analysis holds things together, and historians need it otherwise they’d get lost in the detail. But the narrative must come first because we live our lives going forwards, not side-on. As a student, it took me four years to get in front of a great university storyteller – stand up G A Williams at York – but he was the exception. Otherwise, university history was, and I suspect still is, mainly an exercise in correction. While I acknowledge the need to teach students to to correct themselves, there must be more ways of talking about history than this.
And so to The Rest is History, where two middle-age, middle-class Englishmen are conquering the world by talking about it. Sandbrook went to public school and Oxford. Just for a change, Holland went to public school and Cambridge. Although they admit they were fortunate in this, they don’t go handwringing. They have their heroes and would never be stumped for the reason why. They have their chronicles starting with the Anglo Saxons. They hold to human will over “systemic” outcome, and very rarely do they talk about isms. In episode 557 Holland actually says to Sandbrook, rather grandly I thought, “let us not speak in abstract nouns”. Along the way they enjoy a bit of faux-patriotic fun, usually at French expense.
In other words, they’re a little bit old fashioned but what they lack in discourse analysis, they make up for in range and enthusiasm. All credit to Goalhanger which makes the show. It is impossible to imagine the BBC, or Channel Four, or any of the mainstream broadcasters, building a three-part series, let alone a 600-part epic, around such a pair of geeky white dudes.
So, what’s it like to do a programme? Theo and Tabby, ridiculously young, but key figures in the show’s easy-going ambience, send you headphones and talk you through what will happen on the day. While you are getting ready to record on your mobile phone (anyone can do it), Tom and Dom pop up on a split screen. They are at home and make you feel at home. Now they’ve gone visual, we all know what they look like: Tom a Roman senator in glasses, Dom an ice-cream man in a van. Ready to go.
Most episodes begin with a short speech. The more Germanic it is, the funnier (for some reason) they do it. Heavy on irony, the banter can get out of hand. They went mad on Weird Beards. Pregnant Popes and History’s Greatest Monkeys enjoyed their day in the sun. As a guest, you realise straightaway that they are not there to trip you up or catch you out. Nor is it a sermon. Dom is not Rev Simon Schama gazing rheumily into the middle distance. Nor is it costumery. Tom is not Lucy Worsley ripping across a vicarage garden, although no doubt he’d like to be. It’s not Horrible Histories either. There’s little condescension here, and no progress.
The guys do their own reading and research. The very pace of the show – two a week, every conceivable subject, no connection – sets limits on how deep they can trawl. The conversations set out in straight lines between the piers but quite soon, on the dialectical principle that breadth means depth, they start spilling over the sides into other lines of enquiry. Eight shows on Custer might sound excessive, but they don’t stick to General George. Holland is a classicist who, in the shake of the toga, can go from Tony Soprano’s Tiberius to Donald Trump’s Caligula. Sandbrook is a modernist who writes great books I disagree with.
Well, only in part. They would both squirm, I think, at the thought of being right on everything. In any case, the shows are rarely based on their own primary research. Taking their cue as readers rather than writers, they give full credit and riff from there. And because they are canny on what might prove popular (Oppenheimer? Kyiv Rus? Trumpery?) they usually find the sweet spot. Not always though. I thought Genji of Japan was a bit of a doh-doh. They were hard on Neville Chamberlain. They don’t do much social history. Sometimes they enjoy a joke slightly too close to an atrocity. On the other hand, they moved from 1966 Rolling Stone long hair to 1066 Norman Conquest short hair without so much as a look in the mirror and were brilliant on both. Their differences on the infant Mary Queen of Scots captured two schools of history in a moment. Any suggestion that they don’t do analysis has to account for the ease in which they do.
Road shows are different. Much looser. The one I went to in Leicester must have attracted over a thousand people in the university’s mightiest lecture theatre. Every question started out by saying it came from a fan – family groups, couples on a night out, older folk chuffed to be leaning on a desk again, a good sprinkling of history profs at the front and lines of sixth-formers all in a row at the back. I was astonished at the youthfulness of the event. Before it got turned into a museum, Leicester University used to have a flourishing adult education hub with 5,000 students in the city centre. I recognised the Vaughan College vibe immediately. Only experts could turn a college into a museum in the interests of education.
In Willie Russell’s Educating Rita, Rita is asked by her university tutor to write an essay explaining how she might “resolve the staging difficulties inherent in a production of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt”. “Do it on the radio,” she says. Dom and Tom do it on the audio. There was a time when books weren’t cheap and most people couldn’t read, so they swapped stories. Conversations are not hierarchical, they put you in the middle; and Tom and Dom, in all their geniality, put you there with them. History is not the judgement seat, as Lord Acton had it. Nor is it a trial or an interrogation. Rather, it is the great democracy, where we tell each other who we were and who we are. For years now, the New Statesman has been crying out for a new national story. The Tories hadn’t a clue what that could be because they haven’t a clue, anymore, who they are. Keir Starmer’s techno-administration is no exception.
There are lessons to learn from Dom and Tom. First, the history they tell leaves room for people. It’s not just structures and systems. Second, we need to note there’s an Anglophone world out there not only wanting to hear them talk, but willing to pay to hear it. Third, it might be that in this they represent a different demand for talking differently, that is convivially, about who we are – as in Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell’s The Rest is Politics and other podcasts, programmes and literary festivals. Note for instance how Radio 4’s Natalie Stands Up for the Classics goes light and dark and personal all at the same time. Last week I was astonished to hear yet more BBC Radio 4 serious good-natured fun on tax policy (of all things).
Dom and Tom can be a bit corny, like we all can. They can get the giggles, like we all can. They can flog stuff (bonus episodes free to members), like we all can. They even dare to be English. But in an age raised on clickbait, they are the nearest we get to exploring what we are. This is not to say they can solve the problem of finding a new national story. Only the nation can do that, finding itself as it always has done in a language of signs, not sentences, derived from a common life half-lived and half forgot. Which is to say, the national story is more mythopoeic than grammatical and if we want a new one maybe we should look at how The Rest is History does the old one.
Speaking of signs, the garden shed still stands, Cape St Vincent (1797) was won just by the compost bin, and Rosa, last seen wearing a bicorn hat, is off on a day trip to Portsmouth to see HMS Victory.
[Further reading: Why does Tucker Carlson hate Britain?]
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