I have to admit that I was a teeny bit nervous before I spoke to David Starkey, the man behind so many top quality historical programmes. I have enjoyed his shows very much, and his serious but accessible tone helps to bring so many iconic figures of our history to life. It’s his appearances on Question Time and other shows of that ilk that have made me slightly nervous. It’s obvious that he doesn’t suffer fools gladly and he’s a bit of pitbull when he wants to be, so I was worried that my flimsy questions would provoke a massive spurt of ire. Not a bit of it. Don’t know what I was worried about. What a lovely, funny man. I don’t agree with some of the things he has said on telly in the past, but I really enjoyed the interview. Have a look after the jump to read the words that came out of his mouth, and, exclusively (I think), what he’s going to do next.

All of our TV interviews are right here.

David hosts a new history series called Henry VIII: Mind Of A Tyrant tonight (Monday 6 April, 9pm) on Channel 4. He’s done stuff on the big man before, but this four-part series is billed ‘the definitive biography’ of one of English history’s most controversial characters. There’s the usual dramatic reconstruction, and he uses real-life documents to give the whole thing real credibility. It also examines how Henry went from one athletic, much-loved prince who was lauded as the next big thing to a Middle Ages Stalin. Anyway, enough from me… here’s David talking… a lot. Man, can he talk a lot.

TV Scoop: Hello David. You’ve done stuff on Henry before. Can I ask you what your fascination is with Henry VIII?
David Starkey: Well, it goes back a very, very long way. Dare I say it, it goes back before you were even born if I can sound horribly patronising. I worked on Henry’s Court, the exact equivalent of the Downing Street staff or the White House staff – that is to say the movers and shakers that surrounded the King – for my doctorate research at Cambridge 40 years ago. I had even become interested in the subject when I was an undergraduate, through writing an essay on a subject that was very unusual in those days… Anne Boleyn. That convinced me that the approaches to the reign, which were all about ministers and councillors and whatever weren’t wrong, but inadequate, and the starting point had to be the King and those around him. In other words, instead of a history of institutions we needed a biographical history. Nothing has ever shaken me from that conviction. This approach was deeply unfashionable academically, and indeed still is. In the last couple of weeks a couple of very able young people have approached me at the Oxford Literary Festival, and they confessed – almost like they had some dirty postcards – that they were doing dissertations that were biographical, the problems they were having doing them and the fact that they weren’t being taken seriously. But throughout I’ve been interested in doing biography. It has proved to be a wonderful device for doing television. Television loves two things – it hates generalisation and abstraction (it’s no good at it), but it’s very good at narrative and character. So I’ve been very fortunate. The Tudors, of course, are outstanding charcters and Henry is probably the best of the lot. You’re quite right when you say I’ve done this before, but the shift is – and I’ve received a certain amount of stick for saying it – is that the approaches I’ve adopted before that have become commonplace since the 1960s have very much been about Henry and his wives. This is an extraordinarily important story but… but even more important is the story of Henry. In other words, what this man actually did. The danger is if you approach it simply through the wives it hovers on the brink of soap opera. Now it is soap opera, but it’s soap opera with enormous political importance.

TVS: I think that’s what people forget – he’s a very iconic person in our history…
DS: He is indeed.

TVS: But you are right – people do tend to focus in on his wives and the stories surrounding them. Henry’s story has got a bit like a soap opera…
DS: Again, it feeds into this sort of modern historical novel, which is largely written about women, written by women and read by women. Stuff like The Other Boleyn Girl. It’s a quite amazing book, in the sense that the author, Philippa Gregory, has managed to write an historical novel based on four, known facts. I think it’s one fact per 75 pages. [laughs heartily]

TVS: That is indeed a remarkable achievement. A bit like TV Scoop really. So where are you coming from with Mind Of A Tyrant?
DS: What I’m trying to do is explore Henry as Henry. It’s a really close-up, dense biography of the King, which has been heavily coloured by the fact that I was working on the exhibition [at the British Museum] at the same time and writing the two volumes of the books. But what it is is Henry through his own hand. It’s Henry through the documents that had written, that he altered, that he scribbles on and that he writes outrageous remarks on. We have the enormous luck that Henry was really the first, what we would regard, literate King. I mean, lots of other Kings were literate but they didn’t generally write things down for themselves. Henry was educated to a different level and was involved in policy, especially once he got the divorces, so we’re writing Henry from the inside. What’s also very unusual with Henry is that all this stuff survives. In the same way he was the first King whose shape we know and the first King who we really know what he looks like, because of the realistic portraiture available, he’s also the first King whose mind you can step into because of the documents that survive.

TVS: These surviving documents must be a real gold mine for you…
DS: We have exploited it and we’ve really let the documents, in an exciting way, lead the series… because they’re not only in England. Many of these documents are in foreign archives. We followed the sources to Vienna, to Venice, to Spain, to the Netherlands. What this does is give an idea how England, at that time, was absolutely at the centre of Europe with, of course, the enormous split with Rome his reign represents soon to come. Then it becomes a great contrast. The programme has these wonderful scenes in Rome and Spain, and suddenly you get this tightening down of England. And the sense of fortified England. We do a lot in the final programme about the great forts that Henry builds around England, and we have these fantastic scenes from the armourmants that give a sense of hunkering down and sense of direction. Alongside that is that the enormous change in Henry himself…

TVS: Yes. He went from being an amazingly lovely, loved prince to public enemy number one. What happened there?
DS: He was pure Obama! Pure Obama! Let’s hope we’re not let down in the same way as Henry there. [laughs] I’m sure Michelle will watch his waistline [laughs louder]

TVS: You never know with America and their food these days!
DS: [laughs] You never know! He might finish up the most obese president ever! [laughs]

TVS: He definitely won’t be quite as ginger though…
DS: [laughs] No, no! It is a very extraordinary story. We take it seriously for sure, but we don’t dismiss the soap opera and don’t diminish the role of women. It’s essentially the story of a man falling out of love with one woman, into love with another and then a really, bad, long divorce. Everybody forgets that his divorce lasted for six or seven years. That’s long today, but then, when life expectancy was in your 40s… most marriages didn’t last six or seven years, let alone a divorce. What we’ve done with the series is characterise each programme very sharply. Each one has a title. The first one is ‘Youth’ and we were incredibly lucky with the boy who plays Henry. He is just… he’s stunning, an absolute natural. At the end of it when we tested it, people were practically in tears, saying that they never knew Henry was so nice. Then we have ‘Warrior’, and we emphasise again, with all the apparent novelty of Henry’s reign and break in religion and so on, he not only starts off being very nice, but he was also very conservative. His reign is all about looking back to the reign of Henry V. Again we were very lucky that for the first time I’ve ever seen on TV we had the most terrific jousting scenes. Normally these scenes are such plastic. But these are chaps who are using the correct horse, armour and real lances. You look at it and think, “My God!” They’re all built like brick house doors too. The third programme is ‘Lover’, in other words Anne Boleyn. The centrepieces are all set in Rome because that’s where Henry’s love letters to Anne finish up. You have this extraordinary sense of this infinitely private thing – a man and woman in passionate love – but at the same time this huge public dimension, which stretches over a thousand miles and that their every words echoes across the Papal palace. Then, finally, we deal with the consequences. As the Pope fails to give Henry his divorce, so you get the King struggling, the break with religion, rebellion in England and the destruction of old friends, like Thomas More. It has become commonplace to call Henry the English Stalin, but like Stalin or Hitler there were enormous consequences. It wasn’t just the kind of American excuse for things - not just that he’s ‘a bad person’ – but for the first time, and I know that this sounds mad, you’re seeing England as an island distinct from Europe. Remember, for most of the Middle Ages, England was a part of a huge, cross-channel empire. But suddenly it changed. It was Henry. We use the real books, and I hope people will get a sense of the real Henry. I’m sort of looking over Henry’s shoulder. Every word an actor speaks in the series is real. We make absolutely nothing up.

TVS: This must be a great thrill for you personally, someone who has studied Henry for so long, to bring to life this story. I always wonder though, when you start a new project… how do you go about distilling so much information into something that’s watchable and accessible?
DS: I’ve been very lucky, particularly with this series, to have worked with some very good people. When you write a book you’re largely on your own, but writing TV is a team effort. What we do is bat the ideas around. People will think that we enjoyed ourselves, and we did have some very long liquid lunches. During these though, we just talked with a tape recorder going. What we were really doing is buff out the themes, then talk about the central story and ask ourselves which are the incidents we want to base our story upon. It’s really a process of conversation.

TVS: TV history in general… where do you think it’s at? Are you happy with what’s out there at the moment?
DS: Well, I think we have, during the last 15 years or so, been very lucky. History on television has done very well. Four or five people have emerged who do it extraordinarily well and have been very well funded by the various channels. How long that’s going to continue for, in the current circumstances, is anyone’s guess. Making content of this quality is expensive. And there is the huge problem, unless you’re sitting on the BBC’s license fee. So we’re really fortunate with this and, while we’re not trying to reinvent television history, we’re trying to give it a fresh twist. We’re trying to bring it closer to the original documentation. The problem with the Hollywood version of Henry is that however much violence there is in it, it’s all utterly sanitised.

TVS: Aha… I was going to ask you specifically what you think about The Tudors…
DS: Oh well, you know… I say it’s baby food. Again, you know, we mentioned The Other Boleyn Girl. It’s perfectly obvious that the last person Anne Boleyn saw was not the father confessor, but her stylist and the question was: will my head look good off in this! [laughs loudly]. Can I just gently say that this was not the Tudor order of priority. Oddly. You can never fully get back to them, it was 500 years ago after all, but you can get closer to them and this what we’ve tried to do. One of the ways we’ve done this is dramatise the handwriting and we had a remarkable man working with us who calls himself an historical calligrapher. Or perhaps a more straightforward way to describe is a forger.

TVS: I’d love to see him in the credits as a forger!
DS: [laughs] Can you imagine?!

TVS: Last real question David. It seems to me that you’re never afraid to speak your mind, like most other TV historians who appear on discussion shows. Do you have to be a gobshite to be a TV historian?
DS: [laughs loudly] I think what you need to do is not be afraid to use personality. The historian is not, as some academics believe, is some neutral figure. The historian is a storyteller. You’re also a teacher and all the great teachers are slightly mad. There needs to be that trait of personality and singularity. There needs to be that tone of voice that people recognise. Whether they find it attractive or not they know exactly, “Ah, that’s Starkey”, or “Ah, that’s Schama”.

TVS: But you do have to develop a hard skin, right?
DS: Of course. But then I’ve always been a believer in free debate. I’ve always… for heaven’s sake, I’m gay and I was gay and out when it was much less fashionable and easier than it is now. So of course you develop a fairly thick skin. I’ve also believed that you should never be protected. I speak my mind, and I perfectly expect other people to speak about me and my issues. The thing that’s disastrous, is to avoid offense no one can say anything about anything. When you start enforcing it by law, which was the case attempted by religion, that’s catastrophe. That destroys a free society.

TVS: Any other projects in the pipeline?
DS: Well, there will be another Channel 4 series I won’t start work on until next year. The next series will be on the Churchills. it goes back to John and Sarah at the end of the 17th century – along with Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn one of the most extraordinary couples from history. That gets the dynasty going and then it will come up to date. Quite how we do that? These things are down to conversation, as I explained earlier.
DS: