Simon Schama’s Story Of US (BBC2)
The name’s Schama, Simon Schama . . . Schaken, not Schtirred. Telly’s foremost cultural historian is nursing a soft spot for literature’s most politically incorrect spy.
Drooling over a pristine set of Ian Fleming first editions — ‘It’s fantastic to be in their presence,’ he cooed — the 79-year-old presenter relished reading passages aloud.
He didn’t choose action-packed shootouts or car chases, any more than he’d go into raptures over the trashy James Bond paperback editions of my youth, featuring half-naked models draped around enormous pistols (covers apparently designed by Dr Sigmund Freud himself).
Sir Simon was intent on propounding his thesis that 007 was an artistic response to the decline of our empire, a right-wing fantasy that Britannia remained relevant in the Cold War world.
And you thought the books were just rip-snorting thrillers soaked in vodka martinis and sex.
How wrong Shirley Bassey was when she called Bond ‘Mr Kiss-Kiss Bang-Bang’. She should have nicknamed him ‘Mr Blinkered Denial of Waning Imperial Influence’. That’s much catchier.
To prove his point, in his Story Of Us, Schama read an excerpt from You Only Live Twice in which Bond expounded the causes of the Suez Crisis.
It was teeth-grindingly bad stuff, though it might have been fairer to point out that Fleming was seriously ill when he wrote this, his worst novel.
Sir Simon was intent on propounding his thesis that 007 was an artistic response to the decline of our empire, a right-wing fantasy that Britannia remained relevant in the Cold War world, writes Christopher Stevens
Simon Schama with Jerry Dammers, founder and main songwriter of The Specials
The rest of the episode was devoted to a discussion of mass immigration, which Schama regards unreservedly as a Jolly Good Thing. ‘Call me a kind of dopey utopian,’ he chuntered, ‘but where you have the gift of immigration, you have the gift of lots of different cultures.’
Anyone who disagreed, he implied, was a bovver-booted skinhead waving a National Front placard and lobbing petrol bombs at coppers. He scoured the BBC archives for clips of that type of grotty hooligan, intercut with newsreels of British Asian women looking terrified.
The yobs were whipped up, he explained, by Tory cabinet minister Enoch Powell and his seething oratory. To illustrate Powell’s appeal to the moronic underclass, we saw clips of the politician wearing a bowler hat while riding a horse. Sheer incitement.
Leading the charge against neo-Nazi racism, as Schama’s retelling reached the 1980s, was Coventry pop group The Specials, writes Christopher Stevens
Leading the charge against neo-Nazi racism, as Schama’s retelling reached the 1980s, was Coventry pop group The Specials. No BBC account of the Thatcher era is complete, of course, without a burst of their biggest hit, Ghost Town, with a clip of the band crammed into a Vauxhall Cresta.
Sir Simon was chiefly interested in the band’s political aims, but he made a game attempt to critique their radio-friendly style — ‘a musical fusion, the rhythm and melody lines of Jamaican ska, juiced up with punk rawness and bite . . . skinhead aggression channelled into charged fun.’
Sadly, we didn’t see him pogo-ing to another of the band’s hits, Too Much Too Young. Credit where it’s due, though: for an opera buff, he’s trying to expand his musical horizons. Last week, he interviewed Cliff Richard.
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