I am that evil TV producer who writes history in the present tense that Adrian Chiles detests (I love history programmes. But there’s one trend that makes my blood boil…, 6 September). I love reading his articles; he’s a fantastic writer. But I think he’s slam-dunk wrong about this.
Putting history in the present tense is not the result of a fad. It’s an attempt to change how we perceive it. When history is happening, it’s happening now. The players do not have the benefit of our hindsight – they are in that moment, and they only have the information available to them. And that is how we want the audience to experience it. Context from things they don’t know is incredibly valuable to us, but it will never explain the actions they take because, you know, they didn’t know it.
History is not a book of the past, it just happens to be a present that has already happened. When Covid hit, my eldest daughter said to me: “This is what you mean, Dad, isn’t it? This is history.” Yes, it’s hard for historians to talk in the present tense, but they’ll get over it. Because TV is not a history book.
Dan Gold
Twickenham, London
• Leave the past where it belongs, please. It’s patronising, the belief that everything has to be dramatised. This annoying punditry habit has been around and growing for years.
I suppose it’s fine for novelists if they must (thank you, Damon Runyon and Raymond Chandler for starting it) but when historians and journalists use the present tense to discuss recent past events or culture while contextualising by reference to the present day, we get into a chronological shambles. Where are we now again?
Jinny Fisher
Glastonbury, Somerset
• It is not just TV historians who use the “present” past tense. Judging by verbatim court reports in my local newspaper, lawyers also increasingly use it. Prosecutors seem to believe that they can conjure up a more criminal aura by saying, of the person in the dock, “he creeps up behind the poor victim, and brings his blunt instrument crashing down”.
David Barlow
Worcester
• What Adrian Chiles overlooks in his rather half-hearted objection to the lamentable use of the present tense in historical radio and TV programmes is that we have several past tenses at our disposition.
Their proper deployment can provide a far more imaginative and striking introduction to past times and events than the trendy insistence on the present. This invariably ends in a clumsy reversion to a past tense when the former can no longer adequately convey what needs to be said.
David Parker
Emeritus professor of early modern history, University of Leeds
• I agree with Adrian Chiles about the use of the present tense. If writers are concerned about creating a sense of immediacy but can’t find more imaginative ways to do it, they’ll just have to hope that their works are picked up for film or television. I greatly enjoyed the Wolf Hall dramatisation on TV after giving up on the book.
Karen Barratt
Winchester
• I agree (agreed?) with Adrian Chiles on history in the present tense. I suspect the producer with the big stick shouting “Present, please!” is the same one who insists on talking heads speaking to nobody off-screen instead of addressing the viewer directly.
Daniel Nelson
London
• This article was amended on 12 September 2023. The letter from Dan Gold meant to refer to historians finding it hard to talk in the present tense, not the past tense as stated in an earlier version.
• Have an opinion on anything you’ve read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication in our letters section.
