The Way We Were
Not so much a whistlestop tour as a journey on the history express. That’s Andrew Marr’s Making of Modern Britain, which started its run on the BBC television this month. It charts our history from the death of Victoria up to World War II, which is a lot of ground to cover.
One moment we’re on the battlefields of the Boer War, the next on stage with music hall heroine Marie Lloyd. But there’s no sense of information overload. That’s largely thanks to the presenter’s informal style. Marr is an engaging broadcaster with an arresting turn of phrase. The Boer War he calls “Britain’s very own imperial Vietnam”. He describes King Edward VII as a “sleepy-eyed avocado-shaped man” whose appetite for the female form gave him the sobriquet “Edward the Caresser”.
The programme doesn’t shrink from the less palatable aspects of British history. It’s sobering to learn that concentration camps were born here, and that Sir Francis Galton’s theory of eugenics paved the way for a central tenet of Nazi ideology.
The visuals are just as compelling. Scratchy pictures of Edwardian ladies enjoying a “golden, dappled summer” are contrasted with images showing the filth of the slums endured by the masses. Accompanying all this, is a musical score that ebbs and flows with the mood of the moment.
But it’s Marr’s sense of drama that sets the programme apart from so many other yawnumentaries. In Sarajevo, Gavrilo Princip fired “the starting pistol for armageddon”, a conflict that committed Britain to “the greatest bloodbath the world had ever seen.”
Few broadcasters can pull off a combination of the the dramatic, the disturbing and the daft, but Andrew Marr is surely among them. He’s in danger of becoming a national treasure.