Simon Schama’s Story of Us review – not a good look for an Oxbridge professor

Simon Schama’s new show is, the BBC press blurb says, a “major” series, and it bears a grand and sweeping title, the Story of Us. One always wonders to whom such weighty first-person plurals refer – the answer here is the British people, in terms of how our postwar arts and culture have shaped who we are. But the picture of us is subjective, somewhat vague and limited to just three episodes. Major series are not what they used to be.

The timeline begins with the first cultural event Schama himself can remember, the 1951 Festival of Britain. It presented the country as forward-looking and dynamic, but the techno wonderland it set up on London’s South Bank was a temporary installation that the incoming Conservative government were happy to demolish – and, behind the dream of a bright manufacturing future, workers were on the rough end of Britain’s class divide.

That dissatisfaction was expressed a decade later by “kitchen sink” cinema, out of which Schama picks 1960’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning as the definitive work. The historian goggles at an original copy of Alan Sillitoe’s script at the British Film Institute, revelling in the fierce hostility shown to respectable society by Albert Finney’s lead character, factory worker Arthur Seaton. “It’s an attitude,” says Schama, embarking on one of his strained segues, “that stayed in the DNA of British culture. Decades later, I heard it in punk, and then again in Britpop through the wicked cleverness of Sheffield’s Jarvis Cocker and Pulp.”

Cocker wasn’t born when the film came out, which dampens his ability to assess its impact. But in his meeting with Schama, the singer is gamely enthusiastic about the way it gave a voice to a previously unheard section of the populace. In any case, Schama takes care of the big descriptions himself. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning “[threw] a molotov cocktail at British self-satisfaction” and was, less comprehensibly, “the movie equivalent of late-night fish and chips soaked in vinegar”.

Jarvis Cocker (left) in Simon Schama’s Story of Us on BBC Two. Photograph: BBC/Oxford Films

If those overegged remarks bear an unfortunate hint of the poverty safari Cocker was writing about in Common People, Schama is still at his best when praising his favoured creative works. His section on pop artist Pauline Boty is heartfelt and illuminating, as he decodes the lustfulness and warm humanity of her daring paintings and photographs.

From there we hop to Kenneth Tynan’s transgressive 1970 theatrical showcase Oh! Calcutta! (Boty did some of the artwork) and the censorious backlash it provoked. Archive footage shows Lord Longford campaigning against the “permissive society” by touring a Soho porn shop, trying hard to look aloof and disgusted at the same time; the Festival of Light in 1971, a beanfeast of religious conservatism; and US evangelist Billy Graham hosting a rally in London in 1966, featuring musical guest Cliff Richard. Cliff is interviewed about his transition from rock menace to godly moraliser, although he says he’s learned to be less judgmental now.

So far, a pleasant but slightly random tour of loosely connected artistic happenings has established that Britain is a land of contrasts, where progress towards inclusion and free expression has for ever been impeded by those who value tradition over reinvention. But Schama began by warning that “we live in divided times, an age of rising populism and tribal identity politics” – having shown that these schisms were there all along, he now looks for a contemporary punchline to explain why they seem to have widened recently.

His answer is social media, “an anarchy of the equally self-righteous” where antagonism has replaced nuance: “It’s not discussion, it’s screaming and shrieking and a kind of polemical madness.” Modern discourse is certainly toxic, but the internet being the cause of this, rather than just a magnifying lens through which we clearly see it, is an assertion that needs unpacking. A look back at Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony for the 2012 Olympics does mention that its defiant defence of cosmopolitan Britain took place as Tory austerity was driving us further apart, but otherwise the idea of citizens’ material circumstances pushing them towards extremes is unexplored. Nor is it acknowledged that much of the poison we see online – the demonisation of minorities, the cheering on of atrocities – is merely a rawer expression of attitudes that are readily found in newspaper pages and mainstream politicians’ speeches.

Railing against the democratisation of debate – which is explicitly what Schama does when he calls social media “everybody stamping their feet” – is, for an Oxbridge professor with a cosy BBC gig, perhaps not a good look. It turns the man who was such an admirer of Sillitoe and Boty into one of the reactionary forces we thought he was decrying. Schama is surely right about the importance of culture in our national story, but this programme is a minor contribution.

• Simon Schama’s Story of Us aired on BBC Two and is available on iPlayer.