Adrian Chiles’s article concerning the use of the present tense in television history programmes (I love history programmes. But there’s one trend that makes my blood boil …, 6 September) not only does a disservice to TV historians such as Dan Gold, who “writes history in the present tense” (Letters, 11 September), but also to the innovation and flexibility of the English language.
Chiles takes issue with the apparently nonsensical use of the present tense to describe the past. He gives the invented example, “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.” But Chiles is missing a culturally significant and very useful aspect of the present tense, which is its widespread use to describe the immediacy or perceived recency of that which is being observed or talked about.
