Former Glasgow student on his meteoric TV rise

Neil Oliver, Glasgow University educated host of the hit BBC history series Coast, returned to his old student stomping ground last week for a signing of his new book, A History of Ancient Britain.

The book coincides with a BBC series earlier this year which explored man's earliest existence in the British Isles up to the first Roman Invasion, Oliver documenting this in his usual engaging and passionate style.

Indeed, his popularity is staggering for a man who has risen from a contributor when Coast began lead presenter of the popular programme and a household name. Now, seven series as well as a host of other documentaries later, Oliver tells The Journal about the challenges he faces working in both mediums, his passion for the new project and what he learned from his time in Glasgow.

Most of your books including this one have come off of the back of a BBC TV series. What are the differences between writing for television and writing a book?

I think they are quite different animals really. With television if you have a one hour documentary it really becomes an exercise in leaving almost everything out. In a way it’s like working with illustrated bullet points. It’s quick and scenes never hold for very long. But with a book you can get infinitely more space. The book for this is 160,000 words. The whole series is only about a tenth of what the book is.

As well as the editing do you consider the visual element when you are putting together a TV series?

People start composing scripts in different ways. Some people have a musical theme running through a series and the background music that some of the viewers won’t even notice is part of the narrative. It is a visual medium and it really comes down to finding the right locations and doing what you can’t really do with words. Like they say a picture paints a thousand words and you use the visuals to compensate for the fact that the words are actually very sparse.

Your books are aimed at a much wider audience. How do you go about writing something accessible for that rather than someone studying the subject, while still maintaining a level of credibility?

I’m not an academic and I’m not inspired to write for academics. A lot of history books can be very intimidating – a lot of data in them and maybe a lot of jargon, so I try to keep the thing moving. I’m not trying to teach history to an archaeology expert; I want to pull people in who just have a passing interest.

When we are looking as far back as things like The Cheddar Man – the oldest full skeleton found in Britain at approximately 9,000 years old – how can we know so much about the way he lived from the little evidence we have?

You can tell how he lived from his skeleton and the teeth because it gives you an idea of his diet. You can get so much from just dry bone. A lot of it is to do with context: what was the nature of the burial? Was it deliberate? What were they buried with?

What interests you in going so far back in history?

Just to get to the bottom of it. I just always loved the idea that each ice age has basically wiped the blackboard clean. The ice age came and it drove everything away, plants, animals, everything... what fascinates me is what it must have been like to be those people and be the first. What it must have been like to be the first to leave footprints on the beach, or the first people to trample grass. We are related to them. There is an unbroken line from us to them and it’s just following that.

What was the most significant thing you took away from your time at Glasgow University?

The subject that you study isn’t necessarily going to be where you end up. I have come back to archaeology and history but for a long time it looked like I wasn’t. What I took away from it is a degree is a way to test whether you can apply yourself. A degree doesn’t determine your destiny and you can do what you want with it because you have demonstrated to yourself that you can learn.