A House Through Time is truly brilliant, and all these docs are quality, but yet again noms biased towards modern history. It’s a real problem - if the industry keeps rewarding archive-based films about our era, it’ll keep chasing modern commissions at expense of other stories https://twitter.com/griersontrust/status/1307962552354304000

I’ve been a judge on a major TV industry prize, and it was a disappointing experience. I was one of only two historians in a room of eight people. We were judging the quality of History docs; but one of the other judges made pop music packages for E4

I quickly became aware that some of the judges weren’t interested in the quality of the history, but the quality of the filmmaking. And a couple of them were drawn to docs that elicited strong emotions (disasters, tragedies) because they found them powerful viewing. I get that...

But I desperately had to argue in favour of including at least one programme presented by a historian (a very famous, very brilliant presenter) because otherwise every nomination would have been an archive doc about events in 1950-1990s

There’s a problem if the judging criteria is how they make us feel; that will inevitably make us reward docs that resonate with our own experiences, or give us pangs of nostalgia. But History is also about explaining how people and society can be very different to our own

And so many of the most interesting, and important, history programmes are presented by expert historians working without archive footage and nice photos. But if judges aren’t trained historians, or History makers, perhaps they don’t see the challenges in making such programmes?

It’s not impossible to win awards making programmes about the Romans or Tudors, but the bar is higher for these, and they typically require the harnessing of several dramatic techniques (CGI, reconstruction, experiments) to wow judges for whom a historian talking isn’t enough