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.
Resolving to put a stop to this nonsense, I called the only history producer I know well: Tony Pastor, the man behind the brilliant The Rest is History podcast. I berated him long and hard. Or, should I say, I berate him long and hard but he strongly denies ever telling his historians, Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, what tense to talk in. A likely story. So, I call Dominic. Pardon me, I called Dominic and he assured me they weren’t operating under any kind of tense censorship. And, listening back, it becomes clear how intelligently they switch between tenses: the past tense for painting the general picture and the present for bringing specific events to life. The overall effect is like a classic documentary featuring commentary interspersed with recorded footage. In the absence of available archive material of the Battle of Bannockburn, describing it in the present tense does the trick. Nice work, gentlemen.
Next on my list was Ben Macintyre, of whose work I’m a massive fan. He’s a proper wordsmith who sticks solidly with a straight-batting past tense. So imagine my dismay when I saw him on an ITV documentary called The Real Spies Among Friends, made off the back of the TV drama series A Spy Among Friends, adapted from his book of the same name. Up Ben popped, talking about Kim Philby and whatnot in the present tense! Philby’s a fine student at Cambridge; he goes to live in Beirut etc. Well, I’m not having my main man bullied like that. I managed to get hold of Ben, but he too says there was no coercion involved. “Ooh,” he says. “I must say I hadn’t really noticed. It’s a bit of a trend, I think. I think it’s just a part of storytelling and does help to draw people into the story but, now you mention it, my toes are curling a bit.”
So, if it’s essentially all right with Ben, it has to be all right with me. The past must now be a stranger to me. I will learn to live in the present.
Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster, writer and Guardian columnist
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