London - In History and Videos on YouTube

I just found a new tool to combine information online (Storify.com). Here I collected some YouTube videos about London and its history.
Watch and enjoy ...

Documenting our Times in Film

I am a fan of "Spooks" so please excuse, that I speak of this series here more than of any other.
But in my opinion "Spooks" also does a great job in documenting our time.
Not that the events shown in the parts of this series are real events. But they show, what people fear most today. What they see as a likely event and crisis and how such a crisis could be stopped.
So "Spooks" in a way does much more than being a show of fictional events.
It even does mcuh more than any series centered around personal relationships of their protagonists. Those series mostly show scenereies, relationship topics which are well apart from real life and anything the viewer can really acquire.
Though in general sceptic about future historical documents about our time, I even give "Spooks" to some extent authority to document our attitude towards crises and political situations.

What impresses me about the "Spooks" series is, how closely they reach to portrait real events and still be fictional. The line in between documentary and fictional is a very slim one in this case.
Due to this fact, the "Spooks" series allows a multitude of conclusions. For example it opened my mind to see more clearly how our time would act and react in cases of emergency, what we see as likely crises to occur and how we nowadays would try to cope with them.
The series also reveals a very deep ingrained distrust in politicians, which I never saw as clearly manifested as in this series, though it is common ground for people on the street.
The series achieves to really portrait our times, which is an exceptionally well done work by the writers and the whole film crew of "Spooks"!
As a result, "Spooks" is able to reveal a great deal of attitude, common opinion and ways of living of our time.
Though not a real historical document, it is able to tell a great deal about our generation.

Spooks is both "History and Fiction".

History and Future

The headline seems like an anachronism. But what I often wonder is, how future generations will do research of our time.
Not much information about daily life will be available any longer, as bills, notes, etc. are either thrown away, digital and deleted after a while or technically no longer available.
So I think that future generations will have to research our time through secondary documents like films, interviews, discussions, recorded TV broadcasts of shows, etc. These formats are much more likely to be transferred into future technical formats.
This will be a very selective and for one without a TV set not very fitting way to get a real impression of our time.
Historians in earlier times often also documented their present time.
E.g. Venice did a great job in documenting their history in a way they wanted it to be remembered. With all the multitude of current material I still think that our time in future will be a badly documented time for real life activities. Politics and main events on the other hand will be well documented in news and film.
Blogs are a good way to write about current life, but their future availability in the long run is uncertain. Their multitude also makes them a hard kind of historical document. One also can drown in too much to research and their relevance, connections and backgrounds are unclear and mostly not further researchable.
Here only time will see, what future historians will make of our time.

Actors in Interviews

With most actors, I think they should only appear in films and refrain from doing interviews. I also do not appreciate actors commenting real life events. The utmost non-film-related action I accept from actors is social engagement.
But I absolutely credit them with no authority at all to speak about politics or politicians.
So you well can imagine, that I mostly avoid watching or reading interviews with actors. They can not tell me anything I want to know.
I am not interested in their private life or affairs. The only thing they could impress me with is making good films.

The only exception, which absolutely took me by surprise is the unnamed actor:
I do like him in his roles as Lucas North, Claude Monet, John Porter and (after his character is dumped into a big bowl of water and nearly drowned by Robin Hood) I even like his nearly human but slightly pissed of character of Sir Guy of Gisbourne.

You will ask - what has this all to do with HISTORY, the main aspect of this blog?
I asked myself - do I use the same scruples going through historical documents and results of historical research?
Do I mistrust results, when they do not come from historians or do I demean documents written by a non-professional?
In certain ways I very much do that!
But I also realised, that this attitude, though also practised in earlier times, is much more manifested since the early 19th century and its increasing departmentalisation of science.
Goethe was one of the last German scientists, being able to write about colour theory as well as biological studies of the Gingko tree, while being a well known writer and author of poetry. He still found avid attention and readership for his oevre.
Our division of science today seems to affect all aspects of life and business. Experts of all kind get specialised more and more even to parts of a scientific field.

And now you really have earned the link to the interview I am talking about in so many words:

An Interesting Interview ...

An interview, which alerted me to the modern reception or more correctly scepticism in today's society about politics was the interview on the BBC Breakfast Show about "Spooks" (10/2008).



The interview is in no way criticising politics - on the contrary. The polite way of answering the interviewers questions on a personal experience basis is cleverly done and in my opinion a great way of founded criticism. Here the abilities of the actor (which I knew from "North & South") as well as the topic of the series "Spooks" caught my attention.



P.S.: I do not mention the actors name here in this blog post, as I once read on a fan-blog about him, that mentioning his name alone brings a mega uprise in click rates. As I do not want to use his popularity for my sake, I refrain from mentioning him here directly.

At first I wanted to shorten his name as a replacement for 'special someone' to the initials. You easily will find out, why, as a German historian, I refrained from doing so, when even my university had problems shortening the summer semester that way.