It's a beautifully filmed and cleverly structured series that offers many interesting angles and unearthing of lesser-known facts. It's certainly watchable. And it's honest marketing because its wish to be a feature film (or twenty feature films, in the very least) so blatantly gets the better of scholarly sobriety time and again. I, for one, can deal with that. I don't mind documentaries with actors dressed up as historical persons as long as the costumes are okay and the actors don't get any lines to speak – and in this, Andrew Marr's History succeeds in moderation.
What irks me most about the series is its ill-concealed propagation of our by now all too familiar politically correct gospel that goes: "all white people are ba-ad and greedy, all others are innocent victims." And Andrew Marr's indignant tone of voice and sardonic face don't help matters.
Take his episode on Pizarro's raid of the Incas. According to Marr, the Inca Atahualpa, simply because he had heard that the Bible contained the word of God, blundered into throwing the Bible to the ground, thus giving Pizarro occasion to butcher the whole indigenous Peruvian population. After supplying the Spanish with gold, 'Pizarro had no further use of Atahualpa' and had the poor dear garroted. In so many words, Pizarro is deprived of other motives, such as foreseeing that executing the Inca would bring the entire empire to its knees – and it lies entirely beyond Marr's moral lesson to relate that the Inca Empire just might have been far worse than the Spanish.
One more example from the series will suffice: when relating the dropping of the atomic bombs in 1945, Marr follows the usual marring of this event by omitting to mention that both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were military targets. One was military head quarters, the other home of the Mitsubishi torpedo factories. That the Japanese chose to surround their military HQs and plants with women and children does not entirely justify the usual footage of children playing in schoolyards as the only 'before shots' of the bombings.
What we don't get in Marr's series, luckily, are the attempts to excuse the communist regimes – excuses that were running rampant until fifteen years ago, oddly enough. Marr is quite explicit on this point, lumping 'reds' together with Nazis, and here I quite agree with him, and I salute the BBC for finally realizing the truth. It took some time. No, Marr's sermon is in praise of Islamic culture. They were (are?) so much wiser and more artistic than the rest, on this point miracle follows miracle and wonders never cease, and then the Muslims had the good fortune of not being wicked westerners. Such as Marco Polo, whom Marr proceeds to strip of all honours, like the compulsory liar he is. I mean Marco, not Marr. Or wait: I'll leave that for others to decide.
What irks me most about the series is its ill-concealed propagation of our by now all too familiar politically correct gospel that goes: "all white people are ba-ad and greedy, all others are innocent victims." And Andrew Marr's indignant tone of voice and sardonic face don't help matters.
Take his episode on Pizarro's raid of the Incas. According to Marr, the Inca Atahualpa, simply because he had heard that the Bible contained the word of God, blundered into throwing the Bible to the ground, thus giving Pizarro occasion to butcher the whole indigenous Peruvian population. After supplying the Spanish with gold, 'Pizarro had no further use of Atahualpa' and had the poor dear garroted. In so many words, Pizarro is deprived of other motives, such as foreseeing that executing the Inca would bring the entire empire to its knees – and it lies entirely beyond Marr's moral lesson to relate that the Inca Empire just might have been far worse than the Spanish.
One more example from the series will suffice: when relating the dropping of the atomic bombs in 1945, Marr follows the usual marring of this event by omitting to mention that both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were military targets. One was military head quarters, the other home of the Mitsubishi torpedo factories. That the Japanese chose to surround their military HQs and plants with women and children does not entirely justify the usual footage of children playing in schoolyards as the only 'before shots' of the bombings.
What we don't get in Marr's series, luckily, are the attempts to excuse the communist regimes – excuses that were running rampant until fifteen years ago, oddly enough. Marr is quite explicit on this point, lumping 'reds' together with Nazis, and here I quite agree with him, and I salute the BBC for finally realizing the truth. It took some time. No, Marr's sermon is in praise of Islamic culture. They were (are?) so much wiser and more artistic than the rest, on this point miracle follows miracle and wonders never cease, and then the Muslims had the good fortune of not being wicked westerners. Such as Marco Polo, whom Marr proceeds to strip of all honours, like the compulsory liar he is. I mean Marco, not Marr. Or wait: I'll leave that for others to decide.