Dan Snow's History Hit - History Legends: Michael Wood

Episode Date: December 26, 2020

Michael Wood joined me on the podcast to talk about his career as a historian.Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. Hello, everybody. Welcome to Dan Snow's history hit. It is Boxing Day. It is the day after Christmas and in the Snow household,

not much has changed because we are under lockdown, folks. We're under lockdown. Anyway, here at History Hit, as the year draws to a close, we thought we'd focus on some big, long interviews with some of the greats in the world of history. We've got Mary Beard coming up. We've got Eric Foner coming up, legendary American historian. And today, it being Boxing Day, we're going to start with Michael Wood. He's been on the podcast before talking about his magisterial history of China. But we got him on again because I want to talk about his career. How did it all start? What was his journey from Manchester schoolboy to globetrotting legend?

A man, I think, who really invented the modern genre of history broadcasting. He's also a legend, he's a scholar who does move effortlessly between popular history on television and respected scholarly books and articles off screen as well. He's been a role model to me since I can remember. It's been a huge honour to make TV programmes in a pale imitation of the ones that I watched when I was a kid at Michael Wood Presents, and it's been a huge honour for me to get to know him and to call him a friend and colleague. As you'll see, he's just such a remarkable man. It was just a huge pleasure to record this interview, to get to the man behind the legend. And if you want, we've got a january sale starts there it's a boxing day sale

and a january sale kind of they crash into each other so if you use the code january at history hit tv you can go and watch all of our wonderful programs including the christmas truce you've heard me banging on about so often uh that is doing great guns i think record numbers of people watching that one record numbers people signing up to watch it as well so it's a huge thank you for that vote of confidence it's really exciting to know that when we make big ambitious history shows spend lots of money interview lots of wonderful people film lots of great sequences that you guys will come respond and subscribe to the channel so that's great for next year means i can argue with the money folks and they release more money for content so it's all good it's a virtuous circle

so thank you very much indeed um we are going to be producing more of those next year so if you want to just check out what's going on over at history hit tv please use the code january you get a history hit dot tv use the code january you get a month for free in your second month and your third month and your fourth month for 80 off incredible super cheap so go and check it out. You're paying 20% of the monthly subscription. Just a few pence, really. A few pence or cents is great. In the meantime, everyone, here is Michael Wood. Enjoy. Michael, good to have you back on the podcast. Great to be back. Thank you for having me.

Before we start, I want to talk about your life and career. But before we start, I just want to also salute your book on China, History of China. If people haven't got hold of a copy yet, they need to because it's a classic, really. I use the term advisedly. The joy of having a kind of Mediterranean base and Anglo-Saxon education here in England, thinking how important and wonderful we all are. And the joy of just having my mind prized open to a gigantic swathe of the story of humankind is so special. It must have been a wonderful thing as a scholar to do. Well, it's great stuff, as you know, Dan. I'm not a sinologist, but you know, I've

loved China since I was at school and first went in the early 80s. And it is a truly, truly fascinating place. The great sinologist Simon Leys said China's the other pole of the human mind. And leaving aside its own intrinsic kind of fascination, it's only when you study China that you can really see yourself, you know, as a civilization and a culture. It's only when you study China, he said, that you see what's just Western idiosyncrasy and what is universal human experience and all the rest, you know. And apart from anything else, you know, as you could probably tell from the films we made, the Story of China film was about

four years ago. It's fantastic fun. I've always loved being in China. It's just so sociable and, you know, they love eating and drinking and chatting. And it's a great place. So the book, although it's been a fairly, at times, gruelling work to kind of keep the standards of scholarship up as high as I could with the help of great experts and others.

It's a labour of love. It felt like an interesting time for you to be writing that book, partly because since you've written it and worked in China, relations with China seem to have got frostier. We're hearing more about the Uyghurs. It's probably more difficult to work in China now. But also in terms of development, it seemed like without being a sort of dewy eyed orientalist

about it there was enough of those traditional well the architecture the communities the families that had somehow survived the cultural revolution somehow survived the extraordinary upheavals the 19th and 20th centuries but we're now are now facing slightly more prosaic but you know the bulldozer and the concrete and and the town. But it felt like you were able to get hold of quite a lot of those things. Are we in danger of losing, just as Britain destroyed much of its heritage, completing the work of the German Luftwaffe, are we in danger of losing profound links to the past, the heritage environment of China at the moment? I think, don't you think that that's the case all over the world, though, Dan? I mean, you know, encoded identities that have often taken millennia to build up are just being kind of rubbed away now everywhere in the world.

You know, the last peoples who didn't have contact with outsiders in Amazonia, for example, are now desperately under threat. Everywhere you've seen that wiping away the interesting thing is and i would never guess this when i went to china in the early 80s when after 30 years of communism you just thought it's all gone is how tenaciously the chinese people held on to it and it's sort of coming back you know and you can have these chance meetings like we did when we were making our films with somebody in her and answered oh you know you got to go to joe co and we looked at it on the map and it's like three hours drive south of into the countryside in the middle of nowhere where a million people gather for the festival of the goddess new war you know and and everywhere and in individual families you see this really

strong effort to conserve the past and conserve history and the thing is it's most of all in the memory and in the stories and in the rituals the actual fabric you know we in Britain we look at our history and you want it to be the actual house that Shakespeare lived in you know in China they rebuild these things all the time you know so it kind of looks like Shakespeare's house. And so you're constantly faced by the developers and the bulldozers. I had one great moment like this when there's a town on the Yellow River called Kaifeng. And Kaifeng was the greatest city in the world a thousand years ago, you know, and it's a totally fascinating place.

It's got China's last Jewish community, let alone the kind of Muslim communities and the Christians. And it's still got the narrow little alleys. And it's a magic place. But of course, it's now becoming a tourist place. So the development's going on apace. And we went back to this little quarter of alleyways. And everywhere in these old streets were the big red markers for demolition and rebuilding these picturesque alleys and the local tv came to interview me because i'd been there like 35 years before you know so i had to sort of go i'm kaifeng i'm back you know all this sort of stuff i even pulled out my old map from 1980 whenever it was you know and they said so what do you think about all this and i said well far be it from me to lecture the Chinese about anything but it's such a great place don't knock it down you know in the interview and the interviewer said we totally agree with you everybody in the town agrees the development's going too far but blah

blah you know so everybody's conscious of it I think it's our common experience as people it's a battle that we're fighting everywhere I was were so many bits of your book that I found hugely powerful. I just felt that I was so lucky to be meeting literature and historical events that are as poignant and powerful as the Iliad or Chaucer or Beowulf and as sort of amazing as the death of Henry V and the tragedy of it. You know, whether it's the last southern song emperor being picked up by his coun and hurled overboard to stop him from falling into

the hands of the yuan i think it was you know the monk yeah and just going right kid sorry time to do your duty you've you've lost this battle but there's one thing you can do and that's commit suicide with me slash get murdered um and and jump into the sea and you know there's all these moments i now feel should be part of our collective historic and cultural memory. And I think you're playing a big part in that. It's wonderful. Well, it's true.

I mean, and these are great stories. Actually, when I told that story in the story of China Films and they were seen in China, there were people writing us to it. I'd never seen it like this before. I was in tears at the end. I was in tears.

I was in tears. It was astonishing. Yeah, but they're really great stories. And I think that's what a book like this before i was in tears at the end i was in tears but it was astonishing yeah but they're really great stories and i think that's what a book like this can do because the scholarship on china as you know very well having worked on chinese history the scholarship is just you'd need lifetimes to read the scholarship on individual areas of Chinese history. It's enormous. But there is a valuable space which you occupy and which I occupy. All of us occupy who work in TV, in the media, on history especially, which is between the experts and the scholars and the great scholarship, which might only be read by a handful of people and what I call the dear general public out there

who really want to know. So there is a real, real justification for popularisation. And the art, which I tried with this, you know, it's got footnotes. I don't normally do popular books with footnotes, but the art is to try and situate it so that the intelligent reader out there, the dear general public can get a handle on it, you know. So that's where we situate ourselves, isn't it? That is a very neat segue to what I want to talk to you about this interview. But before I do, I've just got to ask one more thing about China. We talked before

about China and the differences and the similarities that you discover. One thing I did think was fascinating, I think at least two dynasties, is it the Han and the Ming, were set up by formerly illiterate peasants. And like, that's some pretty radical social mobility. I can't think of an example in Europe of that happening. If you look at the Romanovs, they were aristocratic. Bonaparte was a minor aristocrat.

Until the 20th century, I guess. Of course, until the 20th century, then it's slightly different in the nature of power but isn't it fascinating that the Capetians, the Bourbons, the Hohenzollerns, the Habsburgs it's a slow progress but in China I mean a peasant can become

God's representative on earth and all the rest of it I mean it's extraordinary. It could happen yeah and I suppose you could say that Mao was also a peasant emperor you know. I mean it happens in the Roman Empire interestingly enough and I think you could say that Mao was also a peasant emperor. I mean, it happens in the Roman Empire, interestingly enough. And I think how it happens is that you have the most powerful institution in society is the army. And you become an army leader with somebody with great charisma and leadership qualities and drive and ruthlessness and all those.

Then you can rise to the point where the army proclaim you emperor. And that's what happens with the Han and the Ming, you know, and they are redoubtable figures. I mean, Hong Wu, the guy who founds the Ming is, you know, a terrifying character in the end, but it was possible yeah i guess you're right pertinax was the son of a former slave wasn't he became brazil right maybe in a kind of unitary system where the army looms maybe yeah europe was just sort of too fragmented and had all these regional aristocracies and you just couldn't quite isn't that yeah well there you go so you've answered that question for me thank you very much well done michael wood um let's go back talking about being a popularizer of history you were deep into a phd when you left and you went and joined the media.

You became a sort of journalist, a work in the media. Was that decision difficult for you? Do you look back and think, oh, gosh, maybe I should have completed that PhD and become an academic? How does that sit now, looking back over the decades? Yeah, it's really interesting, isn't it? I remember it was my ambition was to be a historian, really, you know, and that might, coming from South Manchester, you know, with Widdenshaw, Marcus Rashford's territory, would have been to teach at the local grammar school, I think. But I did do some journalism,

and then when I was nowhere near finishing my research, I realised it was a big, ambitious project, not exactly suited for the PhD format. And I was nowhere near finishing it when time ran out and I needed to earn money. And I'd done a bit of journalism. So I got a job as a journalist in ITV and I worked for six years on, you know, everything from miners' strikes to you name it. And actually, you realise, although I deeply regretted that I had not become a medieval historian, you realise gradually that this encounter with the real world, with real history, going down to the Miners' clubs in South Yorkshire in the time of Arthur Scargill

and interviewing the Pitt deputies, that that was real history. and interviewing the deputies, that was real history. And, of course, the eye of the storm in the 1970s with the Heath government and everything else, you know. And the first film I ever made was about a minor strike of 1893 and the shooting at Featherstone. Found somebody who's still alive who'd seen it as a little girl. Can you believe it? And then suddenly, I know you've

gone through exactly the same experience which is you realize that actually to make films and you can communicate with a big audience and there's a huge appetite to know out there and it's a different kettle of fish I know films a simple thing isn't it? Words, music, pictures, sounds and out of that you can create not only something which delivers facts but delivers emotion and I have been accused of making films with too big an emotional curve and that's probably true but then we make films don't we about incredibly powerful subjects i'm just reading that book about the aztecs at the moment and we did a series of films on the spanish conquest of the new world 20 years ago and followed the roots of some of these

conquistadors and the stories of cortez and pizarro and the incas are tragedies of an unbelievable scale and moments of drama in history of an unbelievable scale and you can do that with film so I gradually realised that having always viewed television as a kind of temporary halt on the way to actually writing my great book on the making of England and King Athelstan then I suddenly realised and I was sitting in the great desert in the south of Balochistan following Alexander the Great one day, and I suddenly realised that actually this was my career. Well, it is the ur-TV historian career, the original, because you kind of established yourself within the UK and you still are hugely hugely good looking charismatic and wore kind of contemporary clothes and everyone thought it was very cool but then your your programs on following in the footsteps of was there something about the technology of it like previously you know you

might have a sense of man or civilizations and toffs and people's are wandering around stately homes but you got out there and basically made the original and the best history poems which is going on a journey following an epic journey or story and meeting amazing basically made the original and the best history poems which is going on a journey following an epic journey or story and meeting amazing people on the way and so and intercutting that the remarkable present with an extraordinary past that's what everyone's been doing ever since you absolutely pioneered that and why was that because cameras became sort of portable and we could all travel a bit easier like what was it what was it that allowed you or was it just genius on on your part and your colleagues that saw that that was a a possibility well it's interesting isn't it because history before that time as you know

was the history films were pretty straightforward didactic lectures with shots and things and i think i was influenced when I was a kid. I read books by this guy called Leonard Cottrell, who I'm sure you must have come across. Leonard Cottrell was a former war correspondent with the BBC in the Second World War. And after the Second World War, Cottrell wrote a series of books about archaeology. And the first one I read was a book called The Bull of Minos. And it's the story of the excavations of Troy and Knossos and Mycenae of Schliemann and Evans and the discovery of the Greek heroic age and the world of the real world behind Homer. And what was so genius about these books was that Cottrell melded serious academic interviews with Alan Weiss and George Milenas and all that, but as a travel book.

And he sets out from Athens on the little train that goes into the Argyllid and he arrives at nightfall and gets off this little train where the station sign says Moukani, Mycenae. And he talks about the shock of seeing that on the sign. And then there's nobody to meet him. So he walks two miles through the blowing cypress trees to reach this tiny village as it was then. And he knocks on the door of La Belle Hélène Inn. And the lamplight comes to the door. Because this is 1950s Greece.

This is post-Civil War, you know. And they greet him and they're all called Agamemnon and Orestes all the family who had been that had been the lodging for Schliemann when he excavated Mycenae in the 1870s and they make him some food and he goes to bed and he opens Schliemann's book and it's like on the film wibble wobble wibble wobble and you go back in time you know and that was magic to me and actually an element of that I think right from the beginning I thought I love that mix of travel the living culture and if you can get it and it's not always possible the link between the living culture and us today that it's not entirely gone

it's not just a story in the past now Now, obviously, when you're following Alexander the Great or you're with the conquistadors in the Andes, the living culture links with, say, 500 years ago and the conquistadors are right there. They still speak Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs. They still speak Quechua and so on. So that element I've always loved. And even when we did the Shakespeare series, just tried to put a little bit of that into Britain.

Yeah, I think that's what's lovely, is you can actually put it in even in the most familiar landscapes and environments. I've, you know, in my pathetic attempts to imitate Michael Wood, we've had smaller budgets. So I've done mine in, you know, going through the new forest in a michael wood-esque way

land a viking longship on island shores scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt, and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,

was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs, and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold.

Which was the first? Was it Alexander was the first? Alexander was the first. The first of those monumental travel history shows. Yeah, Alexander was the first of those big travel shows. But I had done this series called In Search of the Trojan War, heavily influenced, of course, by the Cottrell books. And there I did do that sense of, you know, as the story moves to Crete, you take the ferry and you arrive in Heraklion

and you go up into the mountains and you stay in a village. I even, I have to say, replicated Cottrell's wonderful scene at Mycenae where we literally did get off the train, walk up, knock on the door at night, sit in bed and open Schliemann's excavations at Mycenae, you know, because it's just too good to miss, you know, it's great, you know, and one should always borrow from the greats of the past, I think. And so that was the Trojan War series really did all those things. Although the very first

series I made on the In Search of the Dark Ages, 40 years ago, I can hardly believe it. I watched it at school school as did everybody else where did the time go but um we still did that kind of gag in some places even on a very low budget and a two-week filming schedule for each episode you know but derek the director and i were just a couple of lads as you know and we were both working in current affairs at that time we had two weeks off to make each of those little films. And it was a lark about, and as we say in Manchester, you know, stuff if they can't take a joke sort of stuff.

So we did all sorts of daft things, you know, hanging out of helicopters in the old flying jacket with Ray-Ban aviators on, talking about dark age Vietnams. And I mean, you kind of put your head in your hands thinking of some of the things that I said then, but it's fun, you know, you're meant to enjoy head in your hands thinking of some of the things that I said then, but it's fun. You know, you're meant to enjoy it and be carried away with it. Jean-Michel, Jean music. Did you, for goodness sake, can you remember that?

Well, it was inspiring to all of those of us who watched it at school. And we thought we knew historians and we thought we knew history. And what we saw in your programs was very different. It must have been an amazing feeling getting that Trojan one off the ground. I mean, is that the big turning point in your career, do you think, getting that sort of convincing someone to send you abroad to use those same techniques? Yeah, I think the Dark Age one was the turning point, really.

I can remember coming, and remember, we were a current affairs unit doing current affairs shows, and we did these films on the side. And the very first film that we made i remember walking to the office next day and somebody saying have you seen the reviews and chris dunkley who was the premier tv critic in those days financial times just gave me a wonderful review saying you know he talked about alan clifton taylor and brunovsky and all the great presenters of factual tv. And then he said,

and here's this guy who's about 25, who's wearing jeans and a leather jacket. And isn't it exciting and interesting? And I think that was the moment that did it, you know. And so those were ideas that we followed all the way through. But the idea of the travel adventure history, which is what I think the Telegraph called the Alexander and the Conquistadors, it was again another of those ideas. And I'm sure you've had the same feeling that you have ideas in your head that you think one day I'd love to do that. And I've been fascinated by the Alexander story since I was a kid. story since I was a kid and I'd read in the when I was at school an article by in the National Geographic by an American couple who traveled part of the route you couldn't do the route then because of the Soviet Union and Central Asia and all sorts of but they'd done part of it

and they'd taken photographs of living culture like the people up in the Kalash of the Chitral Valley and all that and And I remembered that. I thought, that's incredibly exciting, that you could follow the route of Alexander the Great 2,300 years ago and go to those lonely valleys where they came and still find living cultures. And it's always in the back of my mind. And the window of time came in the 90s when in between various wars,

and actually we did it through Afghanistan during the first war with the Taliban, foolishly perhaps, but the window of time presented itself and I did it, you know. So you nurse these ideas, don't you? And you think, one day I'd love to give that a go. And then suddenly the time presented itself. And I think everyone, all the rest of us, have been copying those programmes ever since, really. I mean, I think it's that there's been some developments in cgi and dramatic reconstruction that other programs have gone down but in its essence that's what people want to watch history

programs on on the telly they want to be taken to those parts of the world and have the past linked with the present so beautifully what's your of all of the ones you've done in alexander extraordinary the uh as you say the conquistadors we all remember you've done, I mean, Alexander, Extraordinary, as you say, the Conquistadors, we all remember you've done India and China, Greece. What are some of the ones that really stand out for you? I've got a sort of emotional favourite. There aren't single ones that I'm very proud of. I was looking again recently because we'd had a request for the footage at a film we made 20 years ago or so called Hitler's Search for the Holy Grail.

And this was a 90-minute about the Arne Nebe, the Nazi archeological unit, the real story behind Indiana Jones. Spielberg heard that story from a Jewish guy in Los Angeles, and it was a real unit. And we got hold of the footage of some of these Nazi expeditions to Venezuela to Antarctica and to Tibet and they were proving the race theories of the Nazis

I mean it's a snappy title isn't it my definitely my best title Hitler's search for the holy grail but it was a story about imaginal worlds as the great Henri Corbin used to call them. In other words, worlds that are not imaginary and in worlds that are not real, but they are worlds that people die for, you know. And it's a really powerful, extraordinary film about the German archaeological unit, the head of whom was executed after Nuremberg.

And I'm really proud of that film. The footage is incredible. And afterwards, we'd interviewed the wife of a top SS guy, who was a terrifying person. And we talked about the story of the guy who ran the Annenerbe. And afterwards, we got letters from the daughter of the guy who headed the Annenerbe, who was executed at Nuremberg, who said that was a truthful film. And we got a letter from the SS woman who was unrepentant that was exactly how it was that was how we thought so on both sides you know that's what you try and do in a film don't you but my emotional favorite is a series we did called the story of England which

was a taking one village through the whole of British history and it was a village called Kibworth in Leicestershire and it was an idea that I'd wanted to do for you know 20 or 30 years I'd thought about this and where should we do it and you know and it was with the help of the community and the schools and we got Carenza Lewis and Paul Blinkhorn and you know one or two of the great old time team stalwarts to join the team we started with a big dig where we dug 55 test pits across the village. I say we, the villagers did, you know, schools and grandparents.

And it was the most brilliant experience. We made it in a year, six episodes. I still get a lump in the throat when I get the train to Leicester, past Kinworth, you know. And the Indy called it the most innovative history series ever on TV. And it certainly spawned a lot.

David Olashoga was talking to me fairly recently saying, you know, I was really influential on all the stuff they've done, you know. And I just think it was a wonderful idea because you see how history comes from the bottom, not just from the top, from the bottom up. You see how history doesn't have to be in the southeast or in the capital cities. It's the ordinary people's history. And you see how in any locality,

Bill Hoskins, the great landscape historian, said you ought to be able to tell the history of a country just from one place. And that was the challenge that I set ourselves, as it were. And we had no idea what we would find beyond the certain parameters. It was that first day, I remember in somebody's front lawn, Paul Blinghorn going, oh, well, that's Samian. Samian, where?

Suddenly you're going, what? So that was absolutely great. So that was absolutely great. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan

in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit.

Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold

um you've you've managed because of these wonderful programs you've been talking about and through your books you've managed to straddle the academy you know scholarly history and popular history like i think nobody else has that been so deliberate or just because your interests are are so broad have you ever had to consciously shore up one flank thinking oh god i haven't written anything scholarly for a couple of years i better get one in no no i i don't do that and i um the truth is you mentioned my postgraduate research and the truth is my guilt it's not only guilt but it is my i i love that period of the 9th 10th centuries in britain the viking age the creation of england that's what i that's what i set out to research all

those years ago and i've carried on writing stuff about that both popular and academic i still write academic stuff especially the athelstan period you, I've just finished a big chapter for a book on the Lady of the Mercians, about the lost Mercian animals, you know, Athelflau, the Lady of the Mercians. And I promised myself that this book, which is kind of finished and is in my drawer, but I've hesitated about for a while, I'm going to try and publish it within the next year or so you know so so I've kept it up because it's my little hobby my little passion you know I still find that period totally fascinating so yeah yeah it's it's you know what it's like you're the same you you've you've written books on particular areas that you are fascinated by and and if you are you never lose that fascination

do you no I agree and you're so i'm very lucky but you're so lucky to have had a career where you've been able to jump between subjects so your passion obviously 10th century state formation and in the isles and i couldn't agree more it's so interesting but china in near east ancient near east history do you like do you like being able to jump around? I mean, what's the attraction to you of flirting with all these different periods and places? Yeah, well, I hope it's more than a flirtation. I find if you're doing a big thing like...

Full marriage, full marriage. Yeah, I mean, I'd first filmed in China in the 80s, but this last project, we actually started thinking, you know, I'd written treatments for the story of China back after the story of India you know 2008 or 9 and we started working on it in 2013 so I've actually done seven years of work in China and a dozen films in the last period so it becomes very very intensive and as you know the one of the great things is if you're not an expert in a period you can really talk to the people who are and ask their opinions and bounce ideas and you widen your

reading and deepen your reading don't you and so it's a wonderful privilege to be able to sink yourself into a subject and I've tended to focus on places that I really love you know obviously British history Greece is a lifetime's love India lifetimes love and interest and and China you know if you ask me to do a film about Russia or Japan or you know I'd be all at sea really huh no no more than the next person so they are kind of special interests. But as you know also, TV sends you in all sorts of interesting places, you know, and I remember being asked to do early in my career,

the Great Railway Journey series. And we went up into Rhodesia, as was from Cape Town on a railway, first pioneered by Cecil Rhodes in the height of British imperialism there, while the war was going on, you know, and the last stage of the war was up to Vic Falls on an armed freight train. And, you know, like the next person, you follow the news, don't you? And we knew all about apartheid South Africa and the growing war in Rhodesia. But it made me think

much more about all these issues, which of course have come back to us now with the Rhodes statue story and all that. So that's what happens in TV, isn't it? That's a hard job. And if you get an offer like that, you think hard about it, even if you're not an expert in it.

How do you see history? Where do you think history is at the moment? The world of Trump and Brexit and the rise of global superpower rivalry has sort of thrust historians into the debate at the moment. How do you see your programmes and your body of work fit into that in terms of educating? What should we all be doing in this world of making history popular? Is it enough just to make lots of lovely poems about Anne Boleyn and just satisfy that passion for a wonderful story in the past? Or should there be more? I think it's great to have films about Anne Boleyn. I kind of slightly complain that we get too much of the Tudors and not enough of the Anglo-Saxons. But I think the task is, as Sir John Reith said 100 years ago,

now almost, is to inform, to educate and to entertain. And there's no harm in the entertaining bit. But I do think historians are now on a front line of this battle about fake news, contested histories. It's a very strange moment, isn't it, where there's so many arguments about views of the past. And we, it's happened in america it's happened with us with brexit where brexit was essentially driven by view of the past and it's historians job to try and explain these things and especially where journalism hasn't done a great job to be honest they haven't

faced up to quite a few of the issues that have been raised in all this so i think historians perform a really great function here and you've got to keep keep pushing it and one of those things is about empathy with other cultures isn't it if you demonize other cultures this is my thing about china to be honest i uh you know obviously i love china and its culture and the people but what the government is doing at the moment in xinjiang is is terrible uh hong kong terrible inner mongolia tibet south china sea there's so many areas but we have to remember that the chinese government isn't the chinese people and the chinese government the communist party cannot claim to possess chinese history

so it's really really important to keep these alternative views and things um out there and the response we get from the chinese public you know about email and all that sort of stuff is they're grateful for what they call our view of kind of neutral when they write about us. What it means is they don't think that we're stooges of the Communist Party, and yet we're not bashing China. So I think we have to carry on informing

and educating and entertaining and hope that we add a little something to the mix there and give a steer to the dear general public out there who who want to see the landmarks and know how we understand them i mean i think don't you think the black lives matter is part of a really big movement now which is to ask us to understand our history better. And that goes for the British as well as the Americans. You know, we're living, historians will say, in the aftermath of the British Empire,

it's the greatest fact in our history. Certainly the greatest fact in the last 300 years or more. Everybody who lives in Britain, of whatever background, if your ancestors came from Africa or the Caribbean or India or wherever, everybody has been shaped by the British Empire. And a realistic view of the British Empire seems to me to be a really important issue in education. So historians can make a big difference there. You've got decades left in your career. the mind boggles what you've got what you've got left to achieve what's next? Well I've just been asked to do a 40th anniversary edition of the In Search of the Dark Ages book which is a real hoot so in the same week

that I got the cover for the Chinese translation. Somebody tweeted that maybe the Chinese wanted to publish In Search of the Dark Ages as a guidebook for Chinese tourists when they come to post-Brexit Britain. That was a really great joke. So I've got that. I've got a little book, which I did a film earlier this year about China's greatest poet, Du Fu, who lived in the Tang Dynasty, a time of horrendous breakdown, the age of Beowulf in Britain, and here's the Shakespeare of China, with Sir Ian McKellen doing the readings, who was just absolutely brilliant. And it went down, the Chinese absolutely loved it.

It was sort of hilarious, really. I then got approached to do my travels following in his footsteps because it's a great journey his life really he was a refugee and you know incredible stories and I thought that's I got approached to do that as a book so I've actually done a little book with lots and lots of photographs and maps and stuff like that in his footsteps which is going to be published in China but also here so it's a tiny little thing on the side the future projects I've got this big book on Athelstan coming out the first of my two books on Athelstan coming out I hope in a in a year's time and you know a few other things I'm actually half keeping an eye on the story of Troy to be honest Dan and I haven't admitted this to anybody but the data from the

Hittite the Hittite empire was the great empire in Anatolia in what's now Turkey who fought their battles with Ramses II of Egypt and all that stuff you know but they also fought battles on the coast of the Aegean and the real background to the battles over the city that we call Troy. It is from the Aetan emperor Muwatalli who fought the Battle of Kadesh with Ramses II. So I've written a little book. I've kept an interest in this over the years and I did the lectures at the British Museum for their exhibition and elsewhere

about this story, outlining what I think the narrative actually is. And it's only a small book, not a brain buster like China you know um with with photographs of the landscapes and maps and things like that but I have actually written that and it's another of those things that's in your drawer I bet you've got quite a few in that drawer behind you uh where you um you think maybe so I have actually been writing to the great the three great experts in hittite in the world who i have connections with and one of whom i've been mailed for years and just trying ideas out on them you know one of them i sent him the chronology of

it he said oh i wish i'd thought of that so i might be on a a little track here so i've got a few things to tidy up right depending on how long my career continues well i i think it's got plenty of time left to run um the trojan what i mean jeepers creepers well done you yeah the trojan war the gift that keeps on giving absolutely extraordinary michael wood you're gonna have to come back on the podcast obviously a lot over the next few years thank you for joining us for this special episode it's a great pleasure good to see you keep safe i feel we have the history on our shoulders all this tradition of ours our school history our songs this part of the history of our country all were gone and finished and liquidated

hope you enjoyed the podcast just before you go bit of a favor to ask i totally understand if you want to become a subscriber or pay me any cash money makes sense but if you could just do me a favorites for free go to itunes or wherever you get your podcast if you give it a five star rating and give it an absolutely glowing review purge yourself give it a glowing review i'd really appreciate that it's tough weather that law of the jungle out there and uh i need all the fire support i can get so that will boost it up the charts it's so tiresome but. But if you could do it, I'd be very, very grateful. Thank you. Douglas Adams, the genius behind

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians.

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