Contexts of Production

Abstract

What makes a good history programme for television? The answer to this question will, of course, be very different depending on the respondent’s relationship to programming, either as a historian, a commissioning editor, a producer or an audience member. In the course of my research I put this question to commissioning editors and producers¹ and these were some of the responses: ‘it has to have a gripping story’; ‘we need good images — a visual core’; ‘we have to get insight into the human condition’; ‘we are always looking for a format’; ‘gripping yarns — I want a page-turner in the treatment, I want to find out what happens at the end’; ‘something that gives the audience an experience of history rather than show and tell’; ‘there must be some kind of resonance for today’; ‘things that are original, have more character and are provocative — that have opinion cut through them’; ‘something that informs you about the present’; ‘to give people an idea of what it must have been like’.