Lucy Worsley | Interview
“Ha! Education is pretty low down my list,” laughs Lucy Worsley, the BBC’s grand dame of history, talking to Carl Marsh ahead of this year’s Hay Festival.
Do you get frustrated when people say that history is boring and one of those subjects at school that really has no real value in the workplace; how can you convince them otherwise?
Not at all! If people found it boring at school, then you can’t criticise them for it, they just didn’t have the right teachers or topics. And truly, it’s utter nonsense to say that it has no value in the workplace. In many of the good jobs out there, you will need at least sometimes to make an argument, analyse evidence, work out when someone is lying to you.
Historical times were often very dark and violent; would you have been able to survive in, say, the Tudor times?
I think it depends on which level in society you find yourself lucky or unlucky enough to have been born. The people at the top of the tree in Tudor times had hot and cold running water, sumptuous feasts and wonderful tapestries. The one thing that you couldn’t eliminate as a risk would be dying of a disease to which the cure just wasn’t yet known: smallpox, for example. But you wouldn’t want to be at the very top of the tree, for example: at the court at Henry VIII, if you’d been born with a bit of royal blood, you would have been at risk for political reasons, with the king seeing you as a threat to the throne and deciding to find a reason for sending you to the block.
Is there a period of history which you would have loved to have lived through?
I’m particularly drawn to the 1920s. I love the hair, the long, loose flapper dresses, the dances like the Charleston. I like the sense of liberation after the long dark period of WWI, and the idea that if I were a youngish woman back then, I might have just won the vote for the first time and had the novel experience of getting a job as the war sucked up all possible labour and pulled women into the world of work. On the other hand, I would probably have lost relatives in the fighting, so there’s a serious downside to my flapper dream.
When it comes to your TV work, how much of a challenge is it to condense complex academic historical material for a mass-market audience?
It’s a big challenge, but one you have to step up to. You simply can’t make your television programme ‘just a bit longer’ because you think you’ve got too much material. Judging how much your audience will already know, building on that, and nudging them a bit further in is a special skill.
Is it always your primary concern when either writing a new book or presenting a new show that you are there to educate your readers or viewers?
Ha! Education is pretty low down my list. I see myself as the thin end of the wedge of history. My job is to coax people over the threshold, and I do that through novels, or dressing up for a programme, or making a silly joke, or whatever it takes. Then, once people are hooked, I hand them over to other more serious historians. I’m not ashamed of this, in fact I’m proud of it, and it’s an honourable and valid way of approaching history.
When you approach a historical event or topic that’s been covered a million times, how do you find a fresh approach?
Every generation needs to discover history for itself. So, an 11-year-old girl watching my version of the story of the wives of Henry VIII will be coming to it for the first time. I try to do my best by her. She will have a different set of questions and assumptions even from an 11-year-old girl living just 10 years previously. We come back to the old stories partly because of their familiar, ritualistic, incantatory quality, but as the background of our own lives changes, the telling needs to change too.
Lucy Worsley – Lady Mary, Oxfam Moot, Hay-On-Wye (as part of the Hay Festival), Sat 2 June. Tickets: £9. Info: 01497 822629 / www.hayfestival.com
photos © DANIEL D. MOSES
