Conclusion

Abstract

Themes evident in this collection demonstrate the links in Europe between the representation of the past and cultural — including broadcasting — developments, allowing us to place the scholarly insights raised in the chapters in this wider context in order to consider how television modes, forms and imperatives have mediated the way in which the past is portrayed. Whilst it is useful to look at this collection as a gathering together of important articles about the current state of history programming on television in Europe, we can also provisionally identify the modes of televisual mediation applied to history and in this way examine how television itself shapes representations of the past.

Europe […] is a continent in which one can easily travel back and forth through time. All the different stages of the twentieth century are being lived, or relived, somewhere. Aboard Istanbul’s ferries it is always 1948. In Lisbon it is forever 1956. At the Gare de Lyon in Paris, the year is 2020. In Budapest, the young men wear their father’s faces.

(Geert Mak, 2007, p. xii)