The future of the past

History has never been so popular on the box, says Robert Hanks, but sadly that doesn't mean it's very good. It's not that television can't do history well, but that often its producers are afraid to try

Hindsight is always 20/20: at any rate, that's what sacked football managers and cabinet ministers on the defensive like to tell us. But it's not a claim that will stand up to scrutiny. If anything, when we look at the past our vision becomes more unreliable than usual. We tend to come down with tunnel vision, able to focus on one tiny thing to the exclusion of everything else going on around it. Alternatively, we get a bad case of myopia, and end up trying to make out some recognisable shape from a series of blurred images.

Things don't get any easier when we look through the lens of a television camera. In fact, in recent years, television history has suffered an epidemic of blurriness, and not just in a metaphorical sense. Watching programme after programme, the poor viewer looks for narrative clarity, only to be confronted instead with woozy, soft-edged images of actors in period costume, be it the slim-thighed, fur-clad gladiator girls waving their swords in slow motion in Channel 4's Secrets of the Dead, or the soaring birds of prey in Napoleon's Waterloo and Simon Schama's History of Britain. We know that a picture is supposed to be worth a thousand words, but is that always true? Even when the words are chosen by a historian of Schama's zippy eloquence, the picture is fuzzy and grainy.

In the inaugural BBC History Lecture (to be broadcast on BBC4 this Thursday), Schama takes issue with critics of television history. Taking as his title "Television and the Trouble with History", he attacks those who complain that television is incapable of the intellectual subtlety that history demands, and the wordsmiths who dismiss images as mere illustration, incapable of carrying meaning as robustly and precisely as language does.

The lecture is – as viewers with digital television will be lucky enough to find out – a terrific performance. In many respects, Schama's case can't be disputed. Of course, television can do intellectual subtlety: look at series on recent history, such as The Death of Yugoslavia or Endgame in Ireland (both, not coincidentally, produced by the same company, Brook Lapping). These managed to handle mind-bogglingly intricate narratives with a clarity that books rarely achieve, and an immediacy and emotional force that they never do.

And, of course, images are important repositories of meaning, as Schama himself has repeatedly demonstrated over the course of his History of Britain series. Last week's episode, which contrasted the good intentions of the British Imperial mission with its often horrendous consequences, ended with a visit to the overgrown field in Delhi where statues of the great and good of the Raj, now shabby and mutilated, stand as a pathetic, Ozymandias-style memorial to departed glory. I can't think of a better way of bringing home the ultimate failure of the British Empire, and the bitterness that many of the Empire's subjects felt towards it.

But Schama sidesteps the most important criticisms of the way history is presented on television at the moment. The real problems are not to do with the limitations of the medium, but the inhibitions of its practitioners. It's not that TV can't do history well, but that it doesn't want to.

You may think that it is unfair to pick on a programme such as The Death of Yugoslavia as an example of the way things should be done. With recent events, you can count on having participants in the events around to talk about them, as well as a wealth of archive footage to illustrate. When you go back more than 100 years, though, good, first-person stories and visual props are a whole lot harder to come by.

And the further back you go, the harder things will get. This factor may explain why the sections of Schama's History of Britain that dealt with the Middle Ages offered more blatant visual silliness and more repetition than the parts dealing with the 18th and 19th centuries. My main memory of the Vikings episode is of a gigantic drop of blood curling down the edge of a battle-axe, over and over again.

What are these images doing here in the first place, though? Sometimes, it's true, they do have something important to tell us. But I don't think that excuse works for Schama's Viking axe, or for the imbecilities of Dr Tristram Hunt's Civil War earlier this year, with its billiard-games, pop-promo editing and Crossroads acting.

I think the real explanation is that television producers are, as a class, suspicious of the unadorned spoken word, the talking head, the sustained argument. They don't have a lot of faith, either, in their viewers – we're a shifty, disloyal bunch, the producers reckon, and given half a chance our hands will be creeping out towards the remote, ready to flick over to something a bit easier on the brain.

So the images used in television history these days are rarely bearers of meaning in any important sense. They are there as distractions, to keep us from getting bored. So what if they distract from the information that's being conveyed? At least we're not being distracted by another channel.

There is another, more respectable justification for the twitchiness of television history: what TV can offer is a shifting, multifarious view of the past, one that accords better with our post-modern sensibilities. Who would want a single and authoritative narrator (such as Laurence Olivier in The World at War), when you can have a version of the past that accommodates ambiguity and opposing views? The truth is, though, that television rarely has time for opposing views. When a battery of academics are employed to tell us about the past, their arguments are often assimilated into an over-arching narrative. Instead of getting a number of stories, we get one story told by a series of talking heads. Is that approach actually preferable to a single voice? Watching Schama's lecture, with him frisking about the podium, his voice soaring and tumbling as the excitement of his subject carries him away, it's hard to think so.

In the end, the real problem with television history is that in its haste to fill the screen, it forgets the fascination of the human voice and the human face. It is so eager to make things simple that it irons out the gripping complexities. The past is a foreign country, and we deserve something better than package holidays there.

'A History of Britain by Simon Schama' concludes tomorrow on BBC2 at 9m. He will deliver the first annual BBC History Lecture this Thursday on BBC4 at 9pm