What was their distinction? Well, Macfarlane had written an incendiary book called The Origins of English Individualism, which among other things suggested that the roots of individual as opposed to communal behaviour – the modern personality – dated back to the medieval age and not, as everyone had previously assumed, to the late-modern period. Keynes was an expert on the administrative structures of the 10th century Anglo-Saxon state, while Smyth had done pioneering work on the Viking invasions of a century before. Each of them went on to pursue a distinguished academic career without ever becoming a household name.This always struck me as slightly unfair. Prominent academics have been roped in to descant on historical subjects since the early days of television, and in the 1960s, AJP Taylor’s distinctive, half-hour homilies made him a household name. But Taylor was a one-off, who had little in common with anything that followed.

Whereas 21st-century TV history has seven-figure budgets, dramatic interludes and voice coaches, Taylor just stood in front of a single, unwavering camera and spoke, without notes or autocue, for the requisite 28-and-a-half minutes, gathering up the threads of his discourse into a tense but never less than coherent finale. They were mesmerising performances, but they did not bring the performer many professional plaudits, and until recently TV’s forays into history have been the work of journalists (Jeremy Isaacs, Michael Wood) rather than academics.What Taylor did foreshadow was the professional envy generated by TV history dons. Many of his contemporaries felt there was something slightly disgraceful in the sight of one of their number addressing two million people on the origins of the First World War. This kind of prejudice undoubtedly had something to do with the disinclination of Taylor’s college – Magdalen, Oxford – to renew his fellowship late in his career, something that Taylor described as “slighting me in my profession”.With his articles in the Sunday Express (he described his editor, John Junor, as “a blockhead”) and elsewhere, and his TV appearances, Taylor was the consummate prototype media academic, the original “history man”, to borrow the title of Malcolm Bradbury’s novel At the same time, Taylor’s rise was far from accidental. Not only did he possess the required manner for highbrow TV – bleak, abrasive, controversial but not without humour – but his special subject, late 19th- and early 20th-century political history, was both highly topical and a fixture of the exam syllabi.This tendency endures. Television history mostly follows the A-level and GCSE course outlines, which largely focus on the Tudor period and the 20th century. The administrative arrangements of 15th-century Gascony, to which my old college tutor has devoted much of a professional lifetime, are no doubt a fascinating subject, but not, alas, an area of study that will ever pitch its practitioners in front of the television audience.The television history that followed in Taylor’s wake was more modestly conceived.

BBC2’s Timewatch, which for many years operated as the TV history flagship, relied more on the occasional specialist contribution than the flamboyant, opinion-shooting megastar. Only in the past two or three years, with the advent of Simon Schama and David Starkey, has the form been propelled into the era of rating wars and media feeding frenzies – a professional environment that, it must be said, most of the big teaching institutions are as keen to exploit as they are to disparage. “Every so often the faculty sends on e-mail requests from TV companies,” one Oxford history don, tells me, “implying that history is the new rock’n'roll, listing their various projects and asking for contributors.” It was this alliance between learning and light entertainment that turned up Marc Morris It will turn up others. As the director of the first World Congress of History Producers put it last year in Boston: “We’re the new rock’n'roll.

And we’re going to keep on rocking.”But TV history of this kind comes at a price, one that a good many professional historians, mindful of what colleagues may say about them, are (or claim to be) unwilling to pay To be a TV historian, inevitably, you need an angle You have, above all, to be relevant. Rather than taking the old traditionalist line that past time is interesting in itself, viewers ­ the argument runs ­ have to be convinced that the slices of bygone life placed in front of them have some faint connection to their own lives. David Starkey thus found himself having to maintain that the early Tudor court rather resembled today’s New Labour establishment, while Catherine of Aragon was “the Diana of her time”. As history, as opposed to entertainment, this is simple rubbish, defining people and things by yardsticks that post-date them by several centuries, and yet these are misrepresentations that even the most sober-minded presenter will usually end up enforcing. Tristram Hunt’s excursion to Portadown to talk to the Orangemen on their 12 July march has much more of an eye for historical continuity ­ the march commemorates the 1641 slaughter of Protestants by Catholics ­ but even so, one can see the contemporary nuance, the hook, at work.Behind the spectacle of these promenading historians, whether the greying figure of Dr Starkey or his youthful usurper Dr Hunt, lurks an abiding presence (or absence): the idea of scholarship. However great the televisual relish with which he plunges into his tours of Britain and Ireland, Hunt is eager to stress his responsibilities to this exacting mistress.