Am I alone in finding David Starkey repellant? He’s history’s Carol Vorderman. “I’ve tried to eliminate the really crass errors but I’ve no doubt that I’ve made huge numbers of mistakes. That’s the name of the game when you’re looking at the big picture,” he tells today’s Guardian. Not a sentiment you’d get from, oh, any remotely serious historian: the mystery is that Starkey is regarded as a a better fit for TV and stardom over anyone else. Maybe you have to really *want* it: get the agent, work the old contacts, I don’t know, otherwise I’d be doing it myself. Whatever, Starkey’s ideas would have seem antediluvian in Namier’s day, and teh Guardian’s l4ym0r inverse snobbery line — “He’s not some rent-a-gob pundit straight out of Oxbridge. Like them or hate them, his views are founded in academic rigour [unlike aanyone from Oxbridge…]” — is merely a symptom of the real dumbing-down both it and Starkey claim to deplore. The ‘trickle-down effect’ into TV from the serious historiography of the past 70 years (basically from the French ‘Annales’ school via the British Marxist group) would appear to have been decisively halted — whether this is or is not itself a result of ‘trickle-down’ from the corporatizing of publishing — which, of course, has made history so hot right now — I don’t know. Rockist? 4 life, beeyotch.