How The Rest is History podcast conquered the world
No one saw it coming, and no one quite knows how it happened, but Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland have become a phenomenon.
Robert Colls
Last year, I painted the garden shed while Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook followed me around talking about the Battle of Cape St Vincent. It took me three hours to finish the shed and Nelson slightly longer to finish the Spanish.
Huzzah for The Rest is History, just crowned Apple’s podcast of the year. In the world’s greatest history podcast – five years, more than 600 shows, millions of downloads, best-selling books, British Academy Medal and a world tour with T-shirts – Sandbrook and Holland run a master class in how to make history rock.
No one saw it coming, and no one quite knows how it happened. One thing is for sure, however: The Rest is History tells you stuff – loads of stuff, the sort of stuff I don’t remember being told by anybody else. I don’t know how long they can keep it up, but these guys are the history publishing phenomenon of my lifetime.
University seminars talked a lot about theories and interpretations, structures and systems, but hardly at all and never sympathetically about history’s great personal encounters, moral obsessions, friendships and battleships, its changes of heart and mind.
Nuggety life stories about former British politician Manny Shinwell on the waterfront, say, or Marie Antionette stepping on the executioner’s foot (“Pardonnez-moi monsieur. Je ne l’ai pas fait exprés”), or the enslavement of writer and abolitionist Olaudah Equiano (whose Interesting Narrative was found on John Wesley’s deathbed) we were not taught.
This is not to speak in favour of story over analysis. Analysis holds things together, and historians need it – otherwise, they’d get lost in the detail. But the narrative must come first because we live our lives going forwards, not side-on.
As a student, it took me four years to get in front of a great university storyteller – stand up G.A. Williams at York – but he was the exception. Otherwise, university history was, and I suspect still is, mainly an exercise in correction. While I acknowledge the need to teach students to correct themselves, there must be more ways of talking about history than this.
And so to The Rest is History, where two middle-aged, middle-class Englishmen are conquering the world by talking about it. Sandbrook went to a private school and Oxford. Just for a change, Holland went to a private school and Cambridge.
Although they admit they were fortunate in this, they don’t do hand-wringing. They have their heroes and would never be stumped for the reason why. They have their chronicles starting with the Anglo-Saxons. They hold to human will over “systemic” outcome, and very rarely do they talk about isms.
In episode 557, Holland actually says to Sandbrook, rather grandly I thought, “let us not speak in abstract nouns”. Along the way they enjoy a bit of faux-patriotic fun, usually at French expense.
There are lessons to learn from Dom and Tom. First, the history they tell leaves room for people. It’s not just structures and systems. Second, we need to note there’s an Anglophone world out there not only wanting to hear them talk, but willing to pay to hear it. Third, it might be that in this they represent a different demand for talking differently, that is convivially, about who we are – as in Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell’s The Rest is Politicsand other podcasts, programs and literary festivals.
Dom and Tom can be a bit corny, like we all can. They can get the giggles, like we all can. They can flog stuff (bonus episodes free to members), like we all can. They even dare to be English.
But in an age raised on clickbait, they are the nearest the English get to exploring what we are. This is not to say they can solve the problem of finding a new national story. Only the nation can do that, finding itself as it always has in a language of signs, not sentences, derived from a common life half-lived and half forgotten.
Which is to say, the national story is more mythopoeic than grammatical and if we want a new one maybe we should look at how The Rest is History does the old one.
New Statesman
