So, not content with urinating over the last 50 years of Crusade scholarship, the history channel have turned their attentions to a new period: 'The Dark Ages'. Unfortunately, at the moment i only have the trailer at my disposal to guage just how terrible this show obviously is. Fortunately, the 'making of' trailer contains enough abominations to keep me fuming for...all... a good 5 hours at least.
Indeed, it would appear that all director Christopher Cassel has to do in order to feel my wrath is open his stupid flappy mouth. 'like, dude, Some people say there were no Dark Ages' says Chris,sounding like some kind of heinous Bill and Ted reject. Yes Chris. In fact, this view is shared by most people who've actually bothered to read any decent academic text produced after about 1950. Silly humanists aside, the term Dark Ages was used for describing the Early Middle ages in Northern Europe because, quite literally, it was shrouded in darkness. Historians did not have access to the large volume of Latin Texts which were produced in other places/periods, and archaeologists had not found and fully exploited many key discoveries, such as Sutton Hoo, which have since helped to shape our understanding of the Early Middle Ages. Indeed, for the last forty years, history and archeology have been able to pull their resources with fascinating results - far from a 'backwards' age of violence, it is clear that, in Northern Europe at least, important improvements were made in areas such as agriculture. Even if there was a period which could be classified as the 'Dark Ages', it was also certainly long over by the eleventh century ( Carolingian Renaissance, yeah.)
Who knows, perhaps your author is being rash and the programme is in fact a medieval jewel in a vast vat of World War 2 related shit. If this is the case, these people really need to sort out their promotional material.
technorati tags:Carolingian, renaissance, history, channel, early, middle, ages, sutton, hoo, dark, ages
1 comment:
Egad, sir, you're words fulminate like the grit of truth amidst the fluff that clogs Rupert Murdoch's Australian bellybutton! The medium of television has been misused in the depiction of history. What I despise about the channels used supposedly to 'democratise' knowledge through making it more accesible is that they in fact effectively take popular genres and remake history in it image. For Crimewatch, see 'Great serial killers of the 19th Century'; For Top Gear, see 'Great Aircraft of World War Two'. There is not a shred of analysis, it does not prompt the viewer to actually think; although to be fair, this is a problem of audiovisual history per se as compared to written history (reading is in itself an interpretive act).
Anyhoo, I do believe that there is at least some diversity in the History Channel/UK History's programming on premodern history. As opposed to its coverage of the 20th Century, which seems to assume that all modern history took place in the North African desert between 1939 and 1945. It speaks volumes that the best thing on either of Sky's two history channels is The World At War, and that was produced three decades ago.
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