Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Historian and broadcaster known for presenting A House Through Time, Civilizations, and Black and British; professor of public history.
On the island
Eight records
This is the track that I play in the car or on my headphones when I land in Lagos. I'm half Nigerian, half my family, some of my brothers and sisters live in Lagos. And this track is a way of sort of slapping myself awake and realizing that I'm in this mega city. This is the sound of Lagos, the Lagos stream.
Aunt Molly Jackson was this sort of remarkable political figure, a sort of union organiser and also this collector of folk songs. And she just sings about tragedy, about the music from her childhood. … It's a field recording. I've never played this song to anybody who didn't instantly recognize its just absolute innate beauty.
It's lyrical. It tells a story of this place called Black Mountain, this incredibly tough town where the people are these kind of these rugged individualists. And it's just, it's hysterically funny.
I was working in a record shop in my teens … we put on a record called Best Dressed Chicken in Town by Doctor Alamantado. And I think it's testimony to how versatile Reggae is because it's in this song Doctor Alamantado is complaining about retail price inflation in mid seventies Jamaica and it's just hysterically funny.
Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the GroundFavourite
this is the greatest piece of slide guitar music that has ever been created and it's by Blind Willie Johnson.
It's by a woman called Kishi Wiley that we know very little about … this very biographical song about her relationship with her father is the voice of an African American woman and the tragedies of her life from almost a century ago.
It's a song called Can't Blame the Youth. It was written by Peter Tosh when he was with The Whalers, the original band that became Bob Marley and the Whalers. And it's a song that shows that the history they'd been taught at school, that they, descendants of enslaved people, had been taught a version of British history that was sanitised and they'd seen through it and they mock the curriculum in a reggae song recorded in 1973. I think that's fantastic.
Precious Lord Take My Hand / You've Got a Friend
This is a record that I bought when I was a student and it's Aretha Franklin, the live recording that she did in the early 70s in her father's church and it's a song called My Precious Lord Take My Hand which has been spliced with the song You've Got a Friend by James Taylor in a way that is just perfect and seamless and it is just spectacularly real and raw and honest.
In conversation
Presenter asks
2:05What's your starting point when you're trying to engage the public?
I think there's a really simple rule with me in history, which is that if, as a presenter or as a writer of history, if you don't really care about these people, then I think you've got no business expecting a reader or the audience of a TV programme to care. You have to really want to meet these people. We can't talk to the dead, but we can listen to them and we can try to feel something of what they felt. So to me, it is all, I mean, I sometimes call it method presenting. It is about caring. I really, really want to know about these people. I visit the graves of people who I'm making programmes about because I need to, in some way, transport myself and not just think about what they said and what they did, but what it meant to them emotionally.
Presenter asks
5:31How did your mother make you who you are?
Entirely. I'm a product of my mother's tenacity in getting her children educated with very little in the way of resources, a tenacity of forcing my schools. I mean I'm educated despite, not because of my schools. I'm educated because of my mother, because I have dyslexia and I had very serious problems at school. And they were recognised, eventually diagnosed and eventually treated because of the tenacity of my mother. So even with my learning difficulties still encouraged me to believe that I could go to university, encouraged me to believe that the world of the mind, the world of art, the world of history was something that I could aspire to be part of, to feel an interest in.
The keepsakes
The book
George Orwell
partly because it's enormous, I would take the two volume collection of George Orwell's Essays and Journalism, because I don't really believe in heroes, but George Orwell will be the closest I have to a hero.
The luxury
Presenter asks
9:43How common a feature of daily life was racism for you when you were growing up?
This was just the background hum of life. And in some ways, the most frightening thing about it is we got used to it. I did martial arts, and there's a reason why black guys my age did martial arts. It's because we were living in a violent situation. I mean, school was violent. There was a teacher who had a mug that had a union jack and a slogan that I later discovered was one of the National Front slogans on it. There was a teacher who assaulted me when we were on a camping trip. And I did what children who are frightened do. I hid it from my mom. I didn't confront it. I didn't confront him. I internalised the idea that this is the way the society around me was going to treat me and people like me.
Presenter asks
18:47Why was the McTaggart Lecture one of the most difficult tasks of your career?
It's a big deal. It's the TV industry's most important annual lecture. And it came in 2020, the year of Black Lives Matter. And if I was going to do this lecture, I decided I had to be honest about the industry's failings. And I'm afraid there are many failings when it comes to diversity in the television industry. And to be honest meant being personal, because it would have been dishonest to talk about these issues, this historic failure in diversity, in the abstract. I guess I've spent a lot of my career feeling lonely, where I've been the only black person on a team and I've been trying to explain why a certain line of argument or a certain image for portraying people in certain ways comes with racial baggage, that there is subconscious racial thinking in that. The number of times I've made programmes in Africa where there's been a determination to film people dancing. Rather than people working in offices or people in universities, the number of times that I've been involved in filming sequences about black people and black history where there's been a determination to put children, black children rather than black adults, at centre stage. And I think that comes from somewhere. I think it comes from the racial thinking which saturates our society because of our history. And that's not an assault on individuals. It's not a condemnation. These are very often people I very much admire. It's the fact that if you're brought up in Britain and you're black and you are immersed in black history and thinking about race and experiencing race, you see the world differently and you see things which aren't apparent otherwise.
Presenter asks
23:01What was it about the removal of the Colston statue that you applauded?
This is a man who was the deputy governor of the Royal African Company that transported more people into slavery than any in British history. He was responsible or complicit in the deaths of, we estimate, around 19,000 people. And I think his statue pretended that the only story about him was his philanthropy, which is undoubtedly he was a man who gave lots of money to Bristol. But that money came from slavery. And that statue that told one side of his story and denied the existence of his victims. I think that was an appalling appalling thing to have on public display. It was always something that bothered me about Bristol and I think Bristol is a better place without it.
Presenter asks
29:06What are your hopes for your daughter's future?
I hope that she is somebody whose life is not impeded by her gender or by any racial issues. And above all, I hope that she's happy. She's going to have a very and is having a very different childhood to my own. I'm trying not to imprint upon her things from my childhood. I had a very bad time at school, and she loves school, and I feel very defensive about her in school, which is my problem, not hers. She's perfectly happy. I had an awful time at school, so to me, sending my child to school felt very traumatic. She comes out of school with her face smiling, lots of friends. It's not her problem, it's my hang-ups, but my past.
“I'm educated despite, not because of my schools. I'm educated because of my mother.”
“This was just the background hum of life. And in some ways, the most frightening thing about it is we got used to it.”
“I think this argument has been falsely generated that this is an attack on history. This is part of history.”
“I'm pretty good at solitude, but I'm very bad at boredom.”
“Without any hesitation it would be Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground by Willie Johnson. It's just the most incredible and beautiful and haunting pieces of music.”