Simon Schama: 'The internet creates anger because screaming arguments are clickbait'

"I don't want to come across as a Pollyanna, but I am a glass-half-full sort of person and there is common ground." This common ground exists, his new series Story of Us argues, in moments of national shared creativity, such as the Opening Ceremony of the London 2012 Olympics or the 1951 Festival of Britain. "They were occasions where we could work out our arguments without requiring the other party to be vanquished. I wanted to make a programme that rediscovered them."

Story of Us takes its starting point from Schama's birth in 1945, but the series – where he recalls a childhood visit to the Festival of Britain site on London’s Southbank "when I was six, holding my father’s hand" – isn’t quite valedictorian.

"I don’t want to make it that," he says. "But I suppose there’s a certain amount of the old geezer shuffling around. Which is fine, because I am an old geezer and I do shuffle." But not shuffling off just yet? "No. A lot of people have told me they would be quite cross if I did that, starting with my wife."

In his search for examples of the unifying power of culture, he settled upon the Beatles. You might think the Fab Four burst into life at Liverpool’s Cavern Club or Hamburg’s Reeperbahn, but Story of Us offers an alternative and earlier version where Lennon and McCartney’s revolutionary reinvention of music began in 1960 at the Jacaranda club, a Liverpool venue where Trinidadian calypso artist Lord Woodbine had a residency.

Here, the fledgeling fab three (George Harrison was there, too) listened to Caribbean steel drum music performed by Woodbine, who had arrived in the UK on the Empire Windrush, the West Indian immigrant ship, in 1948.

"It’s undoubtedly true," Schama tells me. "In the documentary we have John Lennon saying that listening to the steel drums was a new musical experience for them, and the Jacaranda was where they started to perform. Then Woodbine helped them get the gigs in Hamburg."

The accusations of wokeness will fly, I suggest, when it’s broadcast. "You’re right. They’ll say he’s rewritten the Beatles’ story in order to make it more ethnically friendly. But this is an unknown corner of the Beatles’ origin story, and it’s factually correct." Being correct, he argues, really matters in a time when bad feeling and fury are amplified by misinformation and monetised by social media.

"The internet is a kind of a reverse matchmaker," he says. "It creates anger because horrible, screaming arguments are clickbait in a way in which reconciliation and listening to each other are not. Every week the division makers go hunting for issues to create rage and that does seem to me an awful turn of events." This, coupled with the rise of populism around the world, left Schama wanting to "take stock of where we are". "I’m about to turn 80, who knows when I might drop dead?"

Another broadcasting veteran, David Attenborough, also provides a unifying culture point in the series.

In the early 1970s, when he was the BBC’s director of programmes, Attenborough did something unheard of: he opened BBC Two, or at least its 11:30pm Monday-night slot, to the people.

"David Attenborough was quite shy about saying it was his idea," says Schama. "So we were very careful to acknowledge it was also the work of other people in the BBC. But he had a lot to do with it, actually." Open Door, which ran from 1973 to 1983, gave studio room to what a delighted Schama calls "Britain’s enormous carnival of passion – ramblers, anti-feminists and feminists, extra-terrestrial explorers".

"It was a show where you simply opened the door to people saying absolutely anything they wanted to in the expectation that they were not going to be tearing someone else down. I was so amazed that this broadcast time and space was given to anybody who could put together half an hour of television without there being that sense of a zero-sum game."

Today, online debate is very much a zero-sum game. There must be winners but, more importantly, there must be losers. Open Door’s participants had wildly differing opinions but, benefiting from the invisible guiding hand of Attenborough, they wanted to argue their own, occasionally eccentric, case. They were generally not in the business of attacking other people – there was free speech but no desire to tear down anyone with different opinions.

On social media, the opposite is true. When Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022, he fired the moderators, making half the staff redundant – signalling a new age of argument. "I fear that’s the case," says Schama. "And nations can tear themselves apart if they allow this gladiatorial screaming and rhetorical swordfight."

As evidence of the dangers, Schama cites the riots that swept across England last summer following the murder of three children in Southport. Author of many books, he was particularly disheartened by the burning down of the Spellow community library at Walton in Liverpool. "The hideous race riots happened right in the wake of a good feeling, at least in most of the country, about the election, not because of who won, but we did have a peaceful election."

It’s claimed that one of the more deleterious effects of social-media use is that it stops younger people reading books. "Are fewer people reading fewer books?" he wonders. "Today is a great day. The library in Liverpool has just reopened. They appealed for money and had lorries of books coming their way and thousands of pounds. I very much hope that a library being reborn is a sign that people haven’t stopped reading books."

In times of heightened political and social antagonism, has he considered changing the way he writes or broadcasts? "You mean looking over my shoulder to see who might pounce and announce? I’m too old for that. The great thing about turning 80 is the only thing I need to check very carefully is whether I’ve got the facts right. Once you start hewing to some sort of notional median point, or pruning yourself to avoid hotspots, you’re done for. That’s not my style at all and never will be."

So on Schama shuffles, taking the good news where he finds it and reminding us that our own culture can counterbalance much of the more negative manifestations of modern life. In that spirit, perhaps he can persuade Attenborough to fire up Open Door and take on X?

"It wouldn’t be a bad idea if he’s up for it," Schama says. "I imagine David feels he’s better off with the elephants and the polar bears or the Siberian tiger. Much easier to deal with than Elon Musk. But I wish he would."

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Simon Schama's Story of Us begins on Wednesday 8th January at 9pm on BBC Two.

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