Simon Schama’s
History of Now
BBC2| ★★★★✩

With the famous saying in mind, “Those who don’t know their history documentaries are doomed to repeat them”, I had better get on with reviewing Simon Schama’s latest exploration, The History of Now on BBC2.

Although a rewatch of his excellent The Story of the Jews might be a good idea regardless, especially for the developing branch of antisemites whose new argument is that we don’t actually exist.

Normally, while the whole “avoiding history repeating itself” is usually a good reason for watching or reading this kind of thing — although my primary motivation is usually the hope of seeming a bit smarter —something different is occurring here. This is the teaching of history in the hope that we can repeat it.

Opening on Schama watching footage of the world at the time of his birth, when rockets and bombs rained down as a result of fascism, we then see the world built in its wake, which led to, as he calls it, the victory of liberal democracy.

He and others argue that victory is now under threat, with the likes of Trump, China, and Putin’s war in Ukraine in the process of reversing those hard-won post-war gains. We’re comfortable on the Titanic and they’re the iceberg. How to change course?

Well, what’s worked during his life is great art: artists as the agents of change. Picasso’s Guernica, Orwell’s 1984, Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, Weiwei’s Straight.

A personal journey, Schama connects these works to his own understanding of the world, while also dropping in fascinating nuggets such as the CIA’s secret funding of modern American art during the Cold War as celebrations of individual expression.

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Simon Schama with Margaret Atwood

They even printed copies of Doctor Zhivago in its native Russian, and gave them out free at the Vatican pavilion to Soviet visitors of the Brussels Exposition.

If Orwell identified the threats to personal freedom, which we see the likes of Hungary’s Victor Orban play to in his demonisation of George Soros, Schama dedicates the bulk of this hour to how to fight back, particularly the example of Czech author, then dissident, then president, Vaclav Havel.

There’s a temptation as documents like Chapter 77 (the manifesto by Czech dissidents holding the government to account for human rights abuses) are spoken about as giving “power to the powerless”, exposing a “life of lies” and “speaking to power” to see these as simple, if not outdated truths.

I’d argue that in an age where bad actors, agencies and algorithms seek to create as much white noise as possible, it’s the simple truths that are the most relevant and necessary to cling to.

This was only the first of three parts, and I imagine they’re really meant to be taken together as a whole.

Along the way knowledge kind of seeps in, so you find yourself learning a bunch of stuff, but what really sticks is the call of age, knowledge and experience, clearly seeing the dangers ahead, and reminding us of the tools to unblock our ears. Hopefully it’ll be just in time so we can make out the cries of “Iceberg!”