I want to share a piece of PHANZA history and popular memory – apt enough at this conference and in a discussion about history on television. In 1995 I wrote to Neil Roberts in my capacity as PHANZA president to suggest that he may have found it useful to call on the services of professional historians for advice in his 6-part documentary New Zealand at War that had screened on TV One that winter. In that way he may have been able to avoid some of the errors of fact that littered the series – 'Like the England rugby team in the World Cup semi-final, New Zealand at War starts badly, and never really recovers', Ian McGibbon wrote in a review – one of the many that pointed to basic mistakes.[1] Never one to kowtow to the critics, Roberts dismissed reviewers, and the legion of writers of letters to editors, as 'trainspotters' or 'war comic wallies'. PHANZA copped a more colourful retort that has passed into organisational folklore: 'I would like to cordially suggest that you and your Executive Committee, individually or en masse should go and stick your head up a dead bear's bum.'[2]

Post-mortem ursine acrobatics aside, the comments of all players in the New Zealand at War saga pointed to a huge gap in understanding and communication between the producers of written history, and the producers of televised history, and the intersections between the two. The appearance on our screens three years later of The New Zealand Wars was a different story. Some criticism still emanated from historians over points of detail: 'personal pub experience attests to the power the “received version” of our story retains over its recipients', reviewer David Green noted, continuing that 'the last time I got into such heated discussions about historical matters was 1981.'[3] The criticisms were mostly in the detail, brought on in some cases by presenter Jamie Belich's predilection for exaggerating for dramatic effect, as Green pointed out, and because, as Jock Phillips rightly noted in his review, Belich had already done his talking to the specialist academic audience more than a decade earlier.[4] We were satisfied – or not – back then, and probably had similar reactions with the visual version. A recognised and respected historian fronting the series helped, rather than using them as talking heads or consultants - what Simon Schama has termed 'low-rent fact-checkers'.[5] Of course that has its draw-backs; the Education Review earlier this year ran a story of 'academic envy and ambition', focusing on the opportunities for bright young historians on British television in comparison with their staid, text-bound colleagues.[6] I suspect we're also partial to a bit of media envy here ourselves.

Yet professional historians remain uneasy about the screen as a way of telling history. As a historian working with Ray Waru on storylines for a history of New Zealand to appear in 2004 I've heard murmurings from colleagues about how the finished product will address complexity, historiographical debate, how it will show multiple views, tease apart fact and fiction, whether it will be too facile, tell us anything new, whether it will be dumbed down, all code, perhaps, for whether it will be proper history – whatever that means. The questions this panel were asked to consider partly arise from this unease: how thorough the research should be, whether a really good image, peripheral to the story, would still be used because of the visual nature of the medium, and so on.

Rather than focus on these questions, I want to think more broadly about why there is a tension, for I think that the uncertainty about screening history goes beyond the simple matter of whether or not historians are used as advisors, story writers, front people or talking heads. I believe it is more to do with the discipline's fidelity to the written word as a primary means of communicating the past. A television series can have all the historical advisors in the world, but if we historians approach it (either as contributors or consumers) as we do written history, we get nowhere and end up in the holier-than-thou business.

Of course we should worry about accuracy in what we see; getting things correct is important. And we are right to take issue with those who just want to have metaphor and 'damn the details': historians need to be in the mix 'for a touch of empiricism', and to find in the details 'the metaphors that lead to understanding', writes Robert Rosenstone, who has had his work turned into both film and documentary.[7]

We can take our role as 'historian-cop' a little too seriously when we see screened history, and focus on the details to the detriment of the larger story.[8] 'My other complaints are minor ones', classicist Michael Grant wrote about a screened and historicized version of Julius Caesar. Minor, but mentioned, nonetheless: 'There seems to be a mix-up about the location of Caesar's murder, and I was sorry to see portrait busts that look suspiciously like Hadrian, who was not born for a very long time to come. I also thought, for a moment, that I saw Nero, but never mind.'[9]

Screened history has to be held accountable to particular standards, but they should be in keeping with the medium and the things that shape that particular genre. We sometimes forget that our own written history is moulded by the conventions of the genre and language. The linear, narrative flow we adopt bears little resemblance to the complex, multi-dimensional worlds in which people have lived, worlds which can more easily be imagined on screen than in print. 'Imagined' is the key here. The teeming masses, the backdrops, the facial expressions in re-enactments, the sights and sounds and atmosphere that writers struggle to evoke are so easily captured on screen. This sense of the past may be fictive - none of this may have 'happened', and so we often take issue with it – but our process of writing history indulges in the same process.

Playing with the past may be 'deeply offensive' to historians as Raphael Samuel notes, but we do it all the same: 'there are…the silences and gaps in the written record which only inference can fill: the statements to be ventured, is only for the sake of a continuous narrative, which a thousand different instances would not prove. Even when we are immersed in the minutiae of empirical research, we are continually having to abandon the world of hard, verifiable fact for the more pliable one of interpretation and conjecture'.[10] The written, like the screened, gives us a representation of the past; history doesn't exist until it is created.[11]

A certain wariness of popular - or too popular - history is also part of the relationship between historians and the screen. Some have seen television history as the vulgarising of history, and are deeply uncomfortable with that.[12] Commenting on the film Spartacus – hardly set up as a piece of history – W.V. Harris sniffed: 'there are innumerable misrepresentations and “mistakes” … yet the responsibility for such errors belongs not to Hollywood alone but also to the entire nonacademic (or popular) culture, which has its peculiar ways of thinking about the past'.[13] Peculiar perhaps, but we should remember that the written word is just one of the ways that people access knowledge of the past, along with folklore, oral accounts, objects, buildings, places, landscape and so on. Increasingly, screened history is a major way: 2.35 million Canadians watched episode 1 of a documentary on Canadian history, A People's History; 40 million people watched the first airing of Ken Burns' treatment of the Civil War in 1990, making it the highest rating programme in the history of American public television.[14] Anne Else has recently reminded us of the 'jumbled popular historical landscape' of which public historians need to take note, rather than 'occasionally pointing out its inaccuracies and simplifications, deploring its commercialism, and castigating its reliance on nostalgia.'[15]

I may seem to have come some way from history on television, but this isn't really the case at all. History on the screen helps us to consider the parameters of written history – or whatever other forms of history we provide. I started with Neill Roberts; let me finish with Simon Schama: 'We are in the business of representing something that's no longer there. Whether we do our history in print or moving images we are not…in the replica business; what we do is persuade our readers or our viewers to suspend their disbelief; to spend a while imagining they are indeed in a world akin…to dreams or memories, a fugitive universe'.[16]

[1] Ian McGibbon, 'Review', People's History, 19, July 1995, p.6.

[2] Neil Roberts to Bronwyn Dalley, 13 June 1995, PHANZA records, PHANZA, Wellington.

[3] David Green, 'Review', Phanzine, 4, 2, July 1998, p.10.

[4] Jock Phillips, 'Review', People's History, 28, September 1998, p.7.

[5] Simon Schama, 'The Burden of Television History', Keynote speech for Banff Festival World Congress of History Producers, Boston, 2001, http://www.history2001.com/pdf/history.keynote.doc

[6] D.J. Taylor, 'Celebrity Heads', Education Review, 16-22 January 2002, pp.8-9.

[7] Robert Rosenstone, 'History in images/history in words: Reflections on the possibility of really putting history onto film', Screening the Past, 6, uploaded 1 July 1999, http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/reruns/rr0499/rrrr6a.htm

[8] The phrase 'historian-cop' is from Gary Edgerton, 'Introduction', in Gary Edgerton and Peter Rollins (eds), Television Histories: Shaping Collective Memory in the Media Age, University Press of Kentucky, 2001, p.6.

[9] Michael Grant, 'Julius Caesar', in Mark Carnes (ed.) Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies, Cassell, London, 1996, p.44.

[10] Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory. Volume 1: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture, Verso, London, 1994, pp.430-1.

[11] Hayden White, 'Historiography and Historiophoty', Screening the Past, 6, uploaded 16 April 1999, http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/reruns/rr0499/hwrr6c.htm

[12] Christina Campbell, 'Making History', Muse, July/August 2002, pp.28-9.

[13] W.V. Harris, 'Spartacus', in Past Imperfect, p.42.

[14] Campbell, 'Making History', p.27.

[15] Anne Else, 'History Lessons: The public history you get when you're not getting any public history', in Bronwyn Dalley and Jock Phillips (eds), Going Public: The Changing Face of New Zealand History, AUP, Auckland, 2001,

[16] Schama, 'The Burden of Television History', http://www.history2001.com/pdf/history.keynote.doc