I like learning about history. There’s an awful lot of it to get through and, with so many gaping holes in my knowledge, I need to crack on. But something is holding me up: somebody somewhere seems to have decreed that the stories of the past must be told in the present tense. Hence we find respected historians appearing on documentaries or podcasts talking about their specialist areas as if it’s all happening in the here and now. Stuff such as: “Napoleon walks into the room to find Josephine playing strip poker with her young lover. Napoleon’s so upset he gets someone to kill her dog.” Or something like that. I get the sense that standing behind the camera is a producer with a big stick, watching like a hawk, waiting for the poor academic to slip into the wretched, unfashionable, fuddy-duddy, past tense. “Present, please!” I suppose they shout. “Again please, Prof. From the top.” The past tense for talking about the past? Those days have gone.
I asked Dan Snow when exactly this decree was decreed. He couldn’t give me a firm date, which is disappointing, frankly, coming from a historian, but I’ll forgive him because he’s on my side. “It can be miserable,” he says. “I often get told to do it. Once I had a strict order to do it across a whole series. It nearly killed me.” Ha! So there is indeed a producer with a big stick.
