Dr David Starkey has carved a niche for himself as the doyen of TV history. Respected and well liked, the presenter of Channel 4's new series Monarchy by David Starkey is the Des Lynam of his trade. His enthusiastic interpretations of history bring the realm of the academic to life, and his programmes have proved accessible and popular.
It comes as something of a surprise, then, to learn about the historian's first foray into television. A former pupil of his (when Starkey was a Cambridge lecturer) contacted him, asking him to appear on a programme called Behave Yourself, presented by Russell Harty. 'It was a cross between Big Brother and Coronation Street – reality TV 30 years before it happened,' says Starkey. 'It had a panel of experts and I was the historian.'
Quite why a cross between Big Brother and Coronation Street would need a resident historian is anyone's guess, and even Dr Starkey's attempts to explain the show's concept are utterly baffling. The show was only ever screened in the Granada region, but Starkey, who in the meantime had become a regular on Radio 4's Moral Maze, was not done with TV yet.
The TV executive's daughter
Indeed, he has a TV executive's daughter to thank for his next big break. The idea for a series on Henry VIII was pitched to Channel 4's erstwhile director of programmes John Willis. The proposal appealed, but Willis was unsure if Dr Starkey's appeal was sufficiently broad for him to present the programme.
Starkey explains: 'He asked his daughter, who was then at school, if she had heard of me, and what she thought about me. Luckily, she was studying the Tudors and was reading my book and liked it.' And the rest is, quite literally, history.
Jewel in the crown
After the success of his series on Henry VIII's wives and on Queen Elizabeth, Starkey was offered a much-publicised deal that saw him match the salaries of such luminaries as Cilla Black and the aforementioned Des Lynam. Suddenly, history on TV was big business, and Starkey was the jewel in the crown.
He says his shows are so popular because he tries 'to tell the kind of history that uses many of the techniques of popular entertainment', for which he readily admits he's been criticised. Nevertheless, it seems to strike a chord with viewers. 'It has very powerful storylines, and vivid characterisation. It shares something of the soap, or of popular drama, and makes no apologies for doing it.'
Sense of excitement
The other reason people warm to Starkey's programmes is the sheer enthusiasm that he imparts. His sense of excitement for his subject is unmistakable. History, he says, has been a passion since he was a child. 'There were two aspects of my childish mind: You're curious, you want to know, and you're also very interested in patterns – not for nothing do children draw and paint and so on. I suppose, from my point of view, what I found was that I could bring together my appetite for wanting to know and my appetite for pattern and shaping into history more effectively than into anything else.'
The enthusiasm and fascination is no studied affectation, either. Starkey says he is constantly learning more about history, and this has been particularly true while he has been working on the Monarchy series.
Voyage of discovery
'The whole lot, particularly the earlier stuff, was for me a complete voyage of discovery. I last did the Anglo-Saxons when I was a schoolboy, and Norman history as a first-year undergraduate. One of the exciting things is confronting this material for yourself, really for the first time. In some cases, being very interested in it; in some cases, being really seriously excited, which I was with the Saxon stuff.
'Anglo-Saxon England, for example, has a uniquely sophisticated coinage. It has got the best-minted, best-controlled coinage, with regulated levels of fineness that were so clever, they could even manipulate the exchange rate. It's just extraordinary. They were far more sophisticated at it than the Romans.'
Starkey admits that his ardour for history is such that he can't remember when he last read a novel – he only reads history books. 'But I am quite good at turning off. The one thing I do not see myself being is an intellectual. I'm not one of those people who feels obliged to be self-conscious and reflective and clever in everything that I do. I enjoy cooking. I like gardening. I enjoy going and having a drink and a good dinner. The idea that you should always be living on this plane of intense intellectual activity I have no patience with at all.'
The Reformation in 125 words
Intellectual or not, there is necessarily a big difference between university lecturing and presenting a TV series. Although Starkey says his career in the former has helped with the latter, he's found that he has considerably less time to get his ideas across in the medium of television.
'One of my most vivid memories of doing television was going back to that first series about Henry VIII. We did a piece on the Reformation, which is a hugely complicated and significant subject. And I thought I'd got it really honed down. I did the piece, and the walks, and the lighting and sound were perfect, and I expected the director at the end to say, "Oh, that was brilliant." But this frown passed over his face, and he looked at his stopwatch and said: "But that was 55 seconds. Can't you shorten it?" Finally, we did the Reformation in 125 words.'
The Monarchy project, covering the entire 1,500-year history of British royalty, is not exactly a subject easily shortened. It will comprise at least three series, and possibly even a subsequent special. Did the scale of the project intimidate him? 'I should've been intimidated, I suppose, but I've always liked taking on big projects … It must be something in me that's bold and crude. Maybe it goes back to the early days of gay lib' – Starkey is firmly out of the closet – 'where there's that wonderful phrase "Better blatant than latent". I just think that, if something's worth doing, it's worth doing big.'
Two 'Greats'
So, in the voyage of discovery that constitutes the first series of Monarchy (from AD 400 to 1471), which monarch made the biggest impression on Starkey?
'Actually, there are two of them. There's Alfred, who really does seem to merit the title "Great". He was quite extraordinary, so amazing that you find it quite difficult to grasp the scale of everything he did in a lifetime of 50-odd years. Here is someone who is a genuine military hero, saves his country when its fate hangs by a thread and, at the same time, teaches himself Latin in middle age, produces not simply workmanlike translations but brilliant ones that actually grasp the spirit of the piece and translate it from one culture into another. He really invents the idea of the English language, of nationhood, and there are only about six people in western European history who are comparable to that.
'Then, on the other hand, there's a man of completely different temperament. But although I finished up hating William the Conqueror – I found him a loathsome man – nevertheless he is genuinely great too. A man of insatiable drive, ambition, power and authority. For me, one of the most moving things I did during filming was standing over his grave trying to grasp the enormity of what he did. He actually conquers a country and makes it a lasting conquest – which is a very rare thing to achieve – and totally transforms it in so doing. Just an astonishing figure – horrible but impressive, a bit like Henry VIII.'
