Top Picks – BBC Four: David Olusoga, A Timewatch Guide, British Empire: Heroes and Villains.

David Olusoga, a historian, writer and broadcaster demonstrated to us the ways the British Empire had been [mis]represented and re-written through television in the last 70 years. The hour long BBC programme revealed how the British Empire had largely been celebrated (to my horror by current historians such as Andrew Roberts), and then critiqued and analysed by historians like Simon Schama and Jeremy Paxman. Timewatch and other material from the BBC archive allows Olusoga to analyse how periods of turmoil in history such as Britain’s Caribbean colonies growing rich on slave labour; chaos that gripped India’s post-independence; and Africa plundered for her mineral wealth were portrayed on our televisions.