Can TV Make History?

By Peter Furtado | Published in History Today Volume: 56 Issue: 5 2006

Peter Furtado introduces the remarkable work of Norma Percy.

We are used to television documentaries about history – they are ubiquitous but largely they reproduce the history that has already appeared in print; and we are aware that a few documentaries (Jamie Oliver’s school dinners series being a case in point) can force their subject up the domestic political agenda. But how many TV programmes make history, whether in the sense that they contribute to the onward march of great events, or in the sense that they add importantly to the record or to historians’ understanding of past events in a way that a written archive could never do? Not many.

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Can TV Make History?

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