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I asked myself - do I use the same scruples going through historical documents and results of historical research?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.