History is omnipresent in British culture: public statuary; street names; museums; so-called great houses open to the public; commemorative ceremonies like those for D-Day, VJ and VE Days; the various ceremonies surrounding the monarchy and other institutions. All of these (and more) offer constructions of the past. This, of course, is true of every society, but one has a strong subjective impression that the phenomenon is particularly deep-rooted and multifaceted in Britain. As our imperial role recedes and our old manufacturing industries decline, there is one industry in which we are still pre-eminent: the recycling and marketing of the past.

Needless to say, this massive national investment in the past is not value-free: it serves certain ideological interests in the present. This is not to say that there is a general conspiracy among the more conservative forces in our society to ensure that the past is constructed in terms congenial to their ideological interests. Rather, the most common and freely available discourses about the past, the discourses most of us live within and regard as the obvious, natural, common-sense accounts of history, are in general more congenial to centre-right rather than left-wing interests.

With regard to television, this process is discernible in the earlysixties development of the first great archival compendium tele-series, The Great War (BBC, 1964), and, somewhat later, the historical drama series, Upstairs, Downstairs (London Weekend Television, 1971–75). The process of recycling the past takes place both on factual and fictional fronts, although, to make clear what is actually involved, it is better to think in terms of, and consequently refer to, ‘fictions in the documentary mode’ and ‘fictions in the dramatic mode’. This does not mean that any of these series, or the personnel involved in them, are calculatedly setting out to falsify history. Rather, it is that terms such as these make more explicit the essentially constructed nature of television, whether documentary or drama, and undermine the widely held notion (particularly with regard to documentary forms) that television offers ‘a window on the world’.