What's the Use of a History PhD, or How Did I End Up in Telly?

As a member of Sheffield’s Student Services, each year I help out at the degree ceremonies.  In the robing room one day last January I checked my mobile and picked up a voicemail from a TV production company. They’d used my latest book as the main source for a forthcoming programme on the industrial heritage of the North, with Robson Green. Would I be prepared to act as consultant? Of course!

So, how does a non-academic end up getting a gig like this? Well, it was at the age of ten, following a visit to the British Museum to see the Treasures of Tutankhamun exhibition that I decided I was going to be an archaeologist. But after underachieving at school I drifted into university thinking it would be best to do “something vocational”. A year later I dropped out; I was never going to make it as a Management Scientist.[1]

I should have realised that I would never make it as a bank clerk either, but I needed a job to keep me from ending up “on the scrapheap of Thatcher’s Britain” as we used to joke even then. That lasted three years, during which my interest in the past resurfaced. At lunchtimes I would go to Birmingham Central Library and became an avid reader of a new magazine called “Popular Archaeology”, a publication that anticipated Time Team in print. The fire had been rekindled and at the age of 22 I entered Birmingham University to read history, taking a number of optional modules in archaeology.

I knew almost from the start that I wanted to take it all the way to PhD, the same way that writers say they write because they “have to”. And from early on I knew my specialism would be in medieval ecclesiastical history. I also knew that I wanted to be an academic, and so it was that I arrived in Sheffield in September 1990 to take up a temporary post as research assistant to Ian Kershaw.[2] And temporary became the order of the day: a one-year contract extension here, some casual teaching there, followed by a three-year post as Lecturer in Medieval and Local History at the University of Hull. By the turn of the millennium – that most momentous of dates – the job applications had been getting nowhere for some time and I was getting by with a part-time job in a local outdoor shop and occasional research work for Sheffield’s commercial archaeological unit, ARCUS.

Then a phone call came from out of the blue. A friend of mine from university was working in TV production and needed someone to do archival research for a programme on the Great Plague. The piece went on to win the award for Best History Programme from the Royal Television Society and on the back of it I got further work making history drama-docs, as researcher, script-writer and even actor!