History is not all bunk

Hello again.

Hope you have all enjoyed your weeks and have had opportunity to take advantage of the early summer sunshine that has hit these shores. I get the impression that the beautiful people inhabiting this fair isle must be solar powered, you don't see them during the winter but all of sudden, they are there to be found in droves now that the sun has come out.

Well, my week was somewhat marred by the wrong result on Wednesday night in Rome. It was disappointing to get so far only to fall at the final hurdle, but what made the result harder to take was how United just did not turn up on the night. There is a time to be carrying out inquests into why United came up so short and possibly a future blog will explore that in more detail, but for now, let me just say that it is easy to forget how well Barcelona played because of the tepid performance that United put up on the night. In particular, the possession football that Andres Iniesta and Xavi displayed in midfield was a joy to behold.

Whenever United relinquished possession, I felt it would take five minutes to get the ball back. One of the common complaints of English footballers is that they are unable to keep possession of the ball. Well, a DVD of how Xavi and Iniesta managed it on Wednesday night will be more of an education than any coaching manual, their ability to keep hold of the ball and to change the tempo of the match was what gave Barcelona the platform to win the match. Oh well, one match should not undo a good season's work and I am sure that Sir Alex Ferguson will remind the players of this failure to drive their hunger to go one better next season.

Well, let's not wallow in self-pity any longer. It is only eleven players kicking a sheep's bladder along a cut up pitch, after all. Let's get down to the nitty gritty and consider some of the other talking points of the week.

3. History should be more than just grey text
This past week has seen it reported that History is not being taught adequately in schools and that children are now less knowledgeable about historical events than they have been in previous generations. I am not certain about how this particular trend has been measured unless they have pulled together a focus group of people from different ages and tested them on history questions, such as when was the Battle of Naseby, who was the king at the time of Guy Fawkes's attempt to overthrow the Government and who really won the Second World War. However this insight was gathered, I think that a good point has been stumbled upon.

First of all, as I prelude to everything else I go on to write, can I say that I love history and learning about historical facts. I did study the subject at school and indeed took it for my GCSEs. I thought that the teaching of the subject at my school was first rate in as much as the teachers did their best to facilitate good learning and were enthusiastic about the subject they were teaching, presenting it in a fun way. If you went to my school, you would know that such a teaching approach was not uniform across other subjects. I imagine that is one of the hazards of a comprehensive school education.

However, the one drawback of teaching in school back in my teenage years, and which at a pinch I imagine still applies today, is that the learning was very much dependent on the humble text book. The school history department had its very own resource room full of a plethora of history books, many of which had been defaced and dog-eared over the years by less keen students of the subject, who were only in class as a matter of compulsion. Text is perhaps the easiest way of conveying the rudimentary facts of the subject, but in terms of the audience reading them in order to learn, much of the knowledge the reader is supposed to acquire is lost due to its grey presentation.

If schools want to make history more appealing, and more significantly, of more educational value to their students then they need to get with the times and embrace technology and interactivity. Look at the success of Brainiac in terms of getting children interested in chemistry and physics. It presents the subject in a fun way, conducting experiments and blowing things up, something that tends to get people's attention and crucially, people do learn from the programme. Schools need to follow the lead of Brainiac and expand their resources far beyond books. Visual and audio resources should be available for a far greater part of the syllabus. Expeditions to relevant history museums or places of local historical relevance should be considered, while how about some role playing exercises? I'm sure the average would much rather dress up as a Tudor than have to wear their school uniform for the day.

It is often said that the main purpose of History is that it gives people a sense of perspective and it understands how the world we live in now has come to be as it is. It is also argued that the point of learning History is that we can learn from mistakes made in the past so as to avoid them in the future and this can provide people with more appreciation and enable them to show more humility for what they have. I personally think there is a lot of truth in these schools of thought, although I would say that if you provide that argument to the average teenager then the likelihood is that they will not want to learn.

If you look at the success of a number of history programmes on television, such as any of Simon Schama's series or even Andrew Marr's excellent History of Modern Britain, then it is quite clear that there is a captive audience for learning about history. It is also true, however, that much of the audience that will watch such programmes will have developed a comparatively late interest in the subject and the chances are that when they were at school, this is a subject that they would have shunned at the age of 14 when choosing what subjects to study for GCSEs.

I think there are a few factors that provide reason for this trend. Firstly, I think that as I have sort of touched upon earlier, History is seen as a slightly unfashionable subject at school. As a teenager, anything over two years ago tends to be regarded as ancient and so what happened 200 years ago or longer just holds no appeal. This is a problem that there is no real solution to because the very nature of the subject means that it is essential to deal with events from far back in time. Recalling my teenage years, I can remember that many fellow students chose their options by the not very scientific method of picking the subjects their friends were doing. Due to History having the perception problem of being the chosen subject of the nerds, it did tend to be shunned by the "in-crowd".

There is also another reason that History is sometimes cast aside among the more worldly wide teenager. While there are potentially lucrative careers ahead for those that study Economics, Geography or even Media Studies, the end game for successful students of History presents a much more narrow scope, with the possible exceptions of being a museum curator or an archaeologist, or indeed, a professional historian. In the fifteen years since I left school, I can honestly say that the knowledge that I accumulated from my days of studying History has served no practical use other than in feeding my recall in the pub quiz's History round. There are no real insights that History can offer when you are forging a career in office administration jobs in the voluntary sector.

And yet perhaps we are all missing the point. Maybe the purpose of History lies beyond providing a gateway into paid employment. As discussed earlier, there is a strong argument to suggest that learning History is essential in knowing how we all came to be here today. The skills learnt from this can transcend just one's working life or their future studies, but can provide the insight that enables people to better citizens, plus it provides some background in helping people to provide a considered argument, a skill that is required in many facets of our lives. Surely these benefits go far beyond serving us just in our professional lives and can lead to a more balanced society?

I think that it needs to be accepted that some of the barriers to making History a subject of the teenage masses are insurmountable. Some of the problems of perception are as much the fault of the teenage hormones as they are of the subject or the way that it is taught. People are simply more ready to engage in the subject as an interest in adult life because they have matured and first hand experience has taught them things that history also does and so they can more readily identify with these insights. Nonetheless, History does have a clear reason for being and those that do want to learn should be grabbed at an early stage and so schools should take heed and embrace as many resources as they are able to and not just rely on their printed material.

4. Variety is no longer the spice of life
So, another reality television series is over with Saturday night heralding the final of Britain's Got Talent. Am I alone in noting the irony of this title when the judging panel includes Amanda Holden and Piers Morgan? What exactly is Amanda Holden's talent other than being the obligatory eye candy? Let's face it, her biggest claim to fame is that she used to be married to Les Dennis before giving Les the metaphorical "it-err", as associated with Les's quiz show of many years. As for Morgan, it has long been realised that his main talent is simply his ability to be in the right place at the right time. Otherwise, I suggest he enters the Highland Games this year because although he is not Scottish, he certainly possesses the right attributes to know what to do with the caber!

Sadly, I missed the final of ITV1's Saturday night showpiece as I was out playing pool, but I gather that Simon Cowell's beloved Susan Boyle was defeated by a dance troupe from Essex. In fact, while this series appears to have captivated several million television viewers these past few weeks, I only watched one episode during its run. That episode was one of the heats and it was enjoyable enough fare featuring a bloke whose idea of a musical act was to use repeated flatulence, another young chap who looked like he belonged in the Foo Fighters singing soprano and a David Blaine wannabe who held his head underwater before doing some fire-eating, all the while his wife looked on. It seemed quite formulaic television, it is easy to see why it has attracted high audience figures because the programme is easy to follow and the audience has the ability to ultimately affect the outcome by voting.

I will readily admit that, on the whole, reality television as a genre does not really appeal to me. There are certain exceptions as there always are and I do try and watch The Apprentice and Dragons' Den whenever they are on and I happen to be in, but this is probably more because of my background as a Business Studies student rather than because I enjoy seeing publicity seeking people make an idiot of themselves in an environment that is out of their comfort zone. Programmes such as I'm A Celebrity and Big Brother hold no interest to me whatsoever. Who on earth in their right mind watches the live Big Brother round the clock on E4? In our everyday lives, I can think of nothing more tedious than spending time seeing what the neighbours are saying while eating their breakfast, so why do our attitudes change when watching television? I suppose the truth is that there is a hidden voyeur in all of us that finds it interesting to see what other people get up to in a confined environment and how the confines of that environment affects the human dynamics. Well, either that, or there just isn't anything else on worth watching!

Programmes like Britain's Got Talent and the X-Factor are, at least to my mind, car crash television. Therefore, the only time I really would watch either programme is at the very early stage when you have the preliminary rounds and therefore, the people who are entertaining simply because they are terrible. In particular, I enjoy the sense of delusion that some of the performers have when Simon Cowell and friends send them packing. They are in denial about their dreams being shattered and tell the judges they have made a big mistake and that they just chose the wrong song or the wrong routine. It is never because they simply have no talent because they are so wrapped up in their aspirations. It probably does not make me sound like a very good person to say that this is the most appealing aspect of these types of show, but the proof is in the pudding. These shows get their best ratings in the early episodes and for the final. If this makes me bad, then I am certainly not alone in the doghouse.

One of the interesting points that I heard raised this week is that the popularity of Britain's Got Talent demonstrates that variety performances are much missed on television. This is a complaint I have heard before from people of an era that can remember such spectacles as Sunday Night at the London Palladium. It is an argument, however, that I vehemently disagree with. The success of Britain's Got Talent, far from demonstrating that variety is missed on television, in fact proves exactly why it is no longer shown on television outside of talent shows.

People watch Britain's Got Talent because it is television that is easy to watch as a family on Saturday night and because the show features everyday members of the public who believe they have a talent, but invariably have far less talent than they believe. From what I have seen of the series, it has shown that some forms of entertainment that were bracketed in to the broad category of variety are so old hat in this day and age. Once you have seen one ventriloquist act, you have seen them all. People fire-eating ceased being entertainment when people stopped going to circuses. And magicians performing cheap card tricks is no longer seen as an act of genius, but just some show-off who knows how to bend the rules. In this series of Britain's Got Talent, even a five year old was performing lame magic tricks. The days of Paul Daniels wowing a prime time audience are thankfully a thing consigned to the distant past.

Surely the whole point of a variety show is to see the most talented performers in their own field showcasing their talents to a live audience. But how do you accommodate these performers all onto one stage? The best stand-up comedians and the best family entertainers are unlikely to fit onto the same bill as the best classical and contemporary musical acts any more because people are more picky and choosy about who and what they want to watch. Taking these broad categories of performers as examples, could you ever foresee a live variety performance with Jack Dee, Ricky Gervais, Jon Culshaw, Brian Conley, Bruce Forsyth, Katherine Jenkins, Jools Holland, the cast of Chicago, Take That, U2 and Darcey Bussell all sharing a stage on the same night, at the same location? It just would not happen because the audience that wants to see U2 does not want to see Take That and equally the Take That fans would not want to see U2. The audience that wants to see Ricky Gervais does not want to see Brian Conley and vice versa, while fans of Brucie and Darcey are going to be less enamoured by the Chicago cast's presence.

Cast your minds back a couple of summers to the Live Earth concerts. The audience were waiting for Elton John to top the bill but the floral industry's favourite tantrum throwing ivory tickler was running a few minutes late. In order to fill time, Ricky Gervais was sent out to entertain the crowd. Under different circumstances, Gervais would have been welcomed, but at a live music venue, the crowd came to see musicians, not comedians and consequently, Gervais far from warming the crowd up before Reginald Dwight took to the stage had the effect of de-energising them and was in fact booed by some sections of the crowd. Admittedly, Gervais's set was not his finest comedic ensemble but the main reason for the audience disapproval was that comedy on a music bill mixes as well as water does with electricity. The reverse principle would also be equally true.

The point is that in modern times, people are selective about what they want to see and when they want to see it. There are very few programmes on television that serve to meet the needs of a wide audience. Programmes are more likely to cater for a certain demographic, people of a certain age and with a particular interest. There are some exceptions, with Later with Jools Holland quite deliberately showcasing a wide range of musical talents so that there is a little bit of something in the programme for everyone and it gives people opportunity to go out and make a cup of tea when their less favoured musicians are performing. Above all though, the main selling point of the programme is the amiability of Holland in the role as mein host.

A point that I have made on these pages before and which I adamantly stand by is that people's yearning for nostalgia can be very misleading and some of the things people wax lyrical about now, were not so popular at the time. So when people talk about the good days of variety television, they are remembering Morecambe and Wise performing or Tommy Cooper performing a magic trick going wrong or telling a daft joke or they are remembering members of the Rat Pack performing to a live audience. This is all well and good, but for every Tommy Cooper, there was a Duncan Norvelle or Joe Pasquale. For Morecambe and Wise, the flip side was Cannon and Ball and if the Rat Pack represented the pinnacle of musical talent, the bottom rung was represented by Showaddywaddy.

Variety as a form of entertainment belongs in a different era, an era when people regularly went to holiday camps in Skegness or Whitby for their summer holidays and consequently, the comedians of the day performed night after night at holiday camps during the summer season, before heading back to the smoky working man's clubs for the winter. In this day and age, fewer people holiday at such resorts as they prefer to trust the reliability of the sun on the continent and the top comedians of 2009 perform sell out tours at large theatres across the country rather than small seaside venues. All the holiday resorts get left with are the middle aged comedians who are so down on their luck that they have to supplement their income by doing some window cleaning and a thousand and one Elvis impersonators. Admittedly, the current economic crisis is seeing an upturn in people holidaying at seaside resorts in the UK, but I very much doubt this will result in old school variety returning to popular mainstream taste.

The problem of nostalgia is not just confined to one's memories of variety. It also applies to situation comedies and to remakes of old programmes or old movies. A recent example of this has been shown by the critical response to the remake of Reggie Perrin. Although the programme has attracted good audience figures, television critics have poured scorn on it, saying it is not a patch on the original and that Martin Clunes was not fit to fill the late Leonard Rossiter's shoes.

Admittedly, I was not born when the original series aired back in the 1970s, but I have watched some episodes when they were repeated some years ago. I thought that the programme was funny in places but also rather dated and that essentially it was Rossiter's powerful performance in the lead role that made the programme. I personally preferred Rossiter's performance as the serial miser and bigot Rigsby in the timeless Rising Damp.

In any event, the remake of Reggie Perrin is not meant to be a straight remake of the programme but a modern day version of the tale in which the lead character plays out his existence in a dead end job with a company that makes disposable razors, rather than selling desserts as he did in the original series. What I thought the remake did particularly well was to make the character's experiences relevant to modern times, capturing well the office culture as well as the mundane routine associated with commuting. This is something that I can particularly relate to in my current circumstances, and I feel that the writers and Clunes's acting performance captured this particularly well.

Far from being a sub-standard remake, I think that the new version of Reggie Perrin has been a very good modern interpretation of the story and Martin Clunes once again proves that he belongs right up there amongst the best comedy actors that these shores have produced with a very believable and moving performance in the central role. Far from turning in his grave, I imagine that if Leonard Rossiter was still alive today, he would have marvelled at Clunes's performance in bringing to life his character to a whole new generation.

The ending to this series suggests that the commissioning of a second series is dependent on the ratings, but I really hope that Clunes and the strong supporting Fay Ripley and Wendy Craig will be back to continue the story next year. But this is the thing with nostalgia, people cannot see past what they remember the first time round, even if the passage of time has in fact blurred their take on reality.

5. Shearer might not be the Messiah, but he could be a very naughty boy
Well, reports of a bubble bursting in the North East of England last Sunday teatime were not without substance. Newcastle United's sixteen year stay in the Premier League came to an end after a feeble 1-0 defeat at Aston Villa ensured that the Magpies would be playing their football in the second tier of the English game in the 2009/10 season. The return of Alan Shearer, this time in a manager's suit was not enough to arrest Newcastle's slide, with the team winning just won of their final eight league matches while under their former number nine's stewardship.

In truth though, Newcastle's current plight is not due simply to recent results but more a legacy of a series of bad decisions taken at board level over the past few years, where those in positions of authority have allowed their hearts to rule their head and impair their judgement. Ever since Sir Bobby Robson was removed of his duties just four matches into Newcastle's 2004/05 campaign, the Magpies have lurched from one bad managerial appointment to another and with each poor appointment, they have also wasted an astronomical amount of money on players whose attitude or injury record ensured they were incongruous in achieving the club's set objectives.

Everything that is wrong with Newcastle's recent setup was demonstrated with the recent revelation that defender Sebastien Bassong was earning just £5,000 a week and has been offered a pay rise in order to persuade him to remain at the club next season. That Bassong was offered a pay rise is not the contentious point, what is shocking, however is that Bassong was earning so little all the while the permanently injured Michael Owen has reputedly been picking up a pay cheque of £115,000. By common consent, Bassong has been Newcastle's best player over the course of the season (admittedly he did not have much competition) while Owen is now living on past glories due to the ravages of injury and lost motivation. This extraordinary discrepancy in Newcastle's wage structure demonstrates an alarming absence of meritocracy and serves to prove where everything has gone wrong at St James's Park and also why their demise has received so little sympathy, as it has been self-inflicted.

Newcastle's supporters will now look to Alan Shearer to stay on and manage the club in the Championship next season, but as the banner on the final day of the season at Villa Park so pointedly said, who is Newcastle's next Messiah, Ant and Dec? This is where Newcastle have continued to go wrong and while you ultimately have to blame the board for making the decisions, the Toon Army support have to take some of the blame for their constant insistence that being "one of us" is a pre-requisite for taking on the Newcastle job. The continual championing of former Newcastle players to be managers of the club has done little to help the club's cause in recent years and what does it really mean to say that the next incumbent needs to "bleed black and white"? Surely, the most crucial aspect in appointing a manager is that they need to be experienced, be able to handle the pressure and know how to get the best out of players. At Newcastle though, there appears to be distrust of anyone coming in from outside the area.

The recent turnaround at Fulham, whose victory at Newcastle in the penultimate week of the season ironically did so much in consigning them to Championship football next season, is testament to what making the right managerial change can achieve. Midway through the 2007/08 season, Fulham were in the Premier League's relegation zone and looked certainties to drop to the Championship. They sacked their manager and replaced him with Roy Hodgson, a 60 year old Englishman who spent his formulative years managing on the continent with spells in charge of the Swiss and Finnish national teams, as well as having a short spell in charge of Inter Milan. Hodgson would not have been many people's first pick as the man to keep Fulham up, especially as his only previous Premier League experience had been over a decade earlier with Blackburn Rovers.

Yet, Hodgson confounded the critics by inspiring Fulham to an astonishing end of season recovery which culminated in the team winning on the final day of the season to stay in the top flight. Hodgson has subsequently transformed the West Londoners and in the 2008/09 season, Fulham have finished a full ten places higher than last season by attaining their highest ever league position in the top flight of seventh place. In achieving this, Fulham have also qualified for European football for next season, which goes to show that if you make the right managerial appointment, you can make such a difference and in a relatively short space of time.

These are the lessons Newcastle need to take heed of if they are to return to the top flight and are to re-establish themselves as a team with aspirations of winning honours. In the short term, they need to solely focus on returning to the Premier League at the first attempt, an accomplishment that all connected with the club would be well advised to not take for granted as the Championship is always an unforgiving division and looks likely to be very competitive next season. Newcastle will need to get some of their mercenaries and over the hill players off of their wage bill and will need to bring players in, but they will be signing Championship level players as reinforcements and there is no guarantee they will sign players any better than those playing elsewhere in the division.

The 64,000 dollar question is whether Alan Shearer will be persuaded to stay for another season. I expect ultimately Shearer will drop his excessive wage demands and will take on the job permanently. The irony, however, is that the manager Newcastle should have appointed two years ago and who may well have kept them in the Premier League, looks likely to be unveiled as the manager of their deadliest rivals Sunderland within the next day. The man in question is Steve Bruce, who is well known as a lifelong supporter of Newcastle who would jump at the chance to manage his hometown club. Instead, in taking the job at Sunderland, he would effectively be ruling himself out of ever managing the Magpies.

If Shearer does stay on at Newcastle, he will need to pick up the ropes pretty quickly and I think the club would be well served in bringing in an experienced manager or coach to work alongside him who would be able to challenge Shearer's thinking. Shearer's existing sidekick Iain Dowie is unlikely to be the right man to perform this role over the longer term as firstly he is likely to go back into club management himself, but I also sense that he is too chummy with Shearer and will therefore find it hard to question his authority. A more senior figure who has seen it all and bought the T-shirt is what is required to help combat Shearer's managerial greenness. Unfortunately, I doubt Coach Carter would be enticed by a cold winter on Tyneside!

I fully expect Shearer to be given the Newcastle job permanently, but ultimately only an immediate return to the Premier League will ensure that Shearer retains his status as Messiah on Tyneside, and is not just a very naughty boy.

6. Debra looks favourite for The Apprentice, but Kate to be the real winner
The hunt for Sir Alan Sugar's fifth apprentice is entering the home straight now with just a quintet of hopefuls remaining with this week's penultimate episode of the series seeing the obligatory interview process with Sugar's merry band of Rottweilers and Jack Russells. Imagine if any of his heavies were conducting a real life job interview, they surely would be contravening employment law with some of the questions they are allowed to ask. It is not so much an interview as a character assassination in some instances.

I have not watched this series as avidly as the previous series, due to the unfortunate scheduling of this series on the same night as Champions League football. Memo to the BBC, please air the next series on a Thursday night when I will be able to guarantee my viewing. However, what I have seen of this series, I would have to say that the male candidates in this series have been a disgrace to their gender. Only James remains of the male folk that started the process, and he really lacks the business acumen to stand any chance of getting beyond the interview stage.

To my mind, the most talented Apprentices this year have been the blonde bombshell Kate and the feisty, fiery saleswoman Yasmina. If the hunt was for my apprentice, these two would indisputably be contesting the final because they have demonstrated the best array of skills, have responded the best to pressure, have led their teams well when asked to and always contributed when amongst the ranks, but are also just very presentable people.

Despite this, however, I have a sneaky suspicion that Debra, the Alan McInally lookalike with a voice like Stacey off Eastenders is going to walk off with the £100,000 job in Sir Alan's corporate empire. She is younger than either Kate or Yasmina at just 23 and although she has shown negative character traits on the tasks during the series, she has also shown good business instincts and has fought her corner well in the board room. These are qualities that Sir Alan Sugar admires and I think he is suspicious of people who come across as too eloquent. Although Debra is raw around the edges, because of her relative inexperience, I expect Sugar feels he can smooth out these edges but can also leave her to get on with doing the job. In a time of financial uncertainty, more than ever Sir Alan is looking for a doer who is capable of the hard sell.

Yasmina to me looks like the stereotype of the common Apprentice runner-up. Consistently good all the way through and a very tough, headstrong cookie who is not afraid to say what she thinks, but ultimately someone Sugar might overlook because of her feistiness. He would be afraid that she would upset people in what tend to be male dominated corridors of power within his organisation. For Yasmina this year, read Claire Young twelve months ago or Ruth Badger back in series two.

In Kate's case, she almost suffers for being so photogenic. People I imagine look at her and think that she is just a dizzy blonde, whereas in fact, I think they might overlook her qualities. The Birmingham lass is a very presentable woman and I am not just talking in terms of aesthetic qualities, but she also has good communication skills and has struck me as being good at dealing with people throughout the process. It would not surprise me if she ends up the real winner from Apprentice series five as if her performance on the home shopping task is anything to go by, she looks a natural in front of the camera and so failure to win the series could prove a blessing in disguise, as a career in the media is surely more lucrative in the long run than managing Sir Alan Sugar's property portfolio.