First air date: 09/30/2000
Last air date: 06/18/2002
Number of episodes: 15
Number of seasons: 3
Genres:
Documentary
Countries:
United Kingdom
Rating:
8.0
Stretching from the Stone Age to the year 2000, Simon Schama's Complete History of Britain does not pretend to be a definitive chronicle of the turbulent events which buffeted and shaped the British Isles. What Schama does do, however, is tell the story in vivid and gripping narrative terms, free of the fustiness of traditional academe, personalising key historical events by examining the major characters at the centre of them. Not all historians would approve of the history depicted here as shaped principally by the actions of great men and women rather than by more abstract developments, but Schama's way of telling it is a good deal more enthralling as a result. Schama successfully gives lie to the idea that the history of Britain has been moderate and temperate, passing down the generations as stately as a galleon, taking on board sensible ideas but steering clear of sillier, revolutionary ones. Nonsense. Schama retells British history the way it was--as bloody, convulsive, precarious, hot-blooded and several times within an inch of haring off onto an entirely different course. Schama seems almost to delight in the goriness of history. Themes returned to repeatedly include the wars between the Scots and the Irish and the Catholic/Protestant conflicts--only the Irish question remains unresolved by the new millennium. As Britain becomes a constitutional monarchy, Schama talks less of Kings and Queens but of poets and idea-makers like Orwell. Still, with his pungent, direct manner and against an evocative visual and aural backdrop, Schama makes history seem as though it happened yesterday, the bloodstains not yet dry.
At the Edge of the World?
2000-09-30
The British Wars
2001-05-08
The Fate of Empire
2002-05-28
Simon Schama
Self - Presenter
Michael Kitchen
Reader
Lindsay Duncan
Reader
Dead Like Me
06/27/2003
American Pickers
01/18/2010
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation
10/06/2000
Continuum
05/27/2012
Survivor
05/31/2000
Make It or Break It
06/22/2009
A.N.T. Farm
05/06/2011
Father Ted
04/21/1995
Revenge
09/21/2011
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
10/02/1955
North and South
11/03/1985
MacGyver
09/29/1985
Star Trek
09/08/1966
Glee
05/19/2009
Jersey Shore: Family Vacation
04/05/2018
CSI: Miami
09/23/2002
CSI: NY
09/22/2004
Criminal Minds: Beyond Borders
03/16/2016
The New Scooby-Doo Movies
09/09/1972
Numb3rs
01/23/2005