I like this style of presentation. No trashy graphics, dramatic music or weird camera angles. A simple background, no celeb presenters, just one articulate person who knows what he or she is talking about.
It is said that Taylor didn't know what he was going to say until he reached the studio. The car would pick him up and he would work out the lecture en route. He then delivered his talk (which always had an introduction - content and appropriate conclusion) without notes or aids and finished exactly on time. I don't know if it's true but I like to think it is.
That's what Taylor claims in his autobiography. He says that one reason he was sought after by the BBC is that he could talk for a given length without notes. He believes he was nominated for a prize lecture series because the previous nominee had funked on preparing the lectures, and Taylor could lecture on short notice.
I remember this being attached to some sort of television series but can't for the life of me remember the name of it. I do remember watching these when I was a kid though and as I'm from Birkdale it's nice to look at it in its better days and not as it is now with loads of trashy restaurants etc .
Does anyone have the full program of How Wars Began? I recall seeing these series of programs back in the late 80's I think he did the Franco-Prussian War, the Crimean War, as well as the two World Wars.
Ah wow, absolutely fascinating, and not a pinch of patriotic bias, now that's how you treat history, if you get too close from one side, she will run the other way. Unfortunately, today's TV "historians" apparently missed that part, fiction when presented as factual can turn good men into jellyfish.
