The end of history

Today saw the very last broadcast programme in Radio Four's A History of the World in 100 Objects. If you have no idea what this is, the title speaks for itself really; the curator of the British Museum has chosen 100 artefacts and narrated a radio series examining the significance of each one. Yes, there are 100 episodes. No, I've not yet heard them all. Yes, it is brilliant

I can't praise this series highly enough - where to start? An elegantly simple concept, although a massive project overall, with a knowledgeable and unobtrusive presenter (a rarity), equally appropriate and knowledgeable contributors, patient and engaging. It was intellectual without being monotonous or high-minded, and perfectly combined education and entertainment, to use Reithian terms. If the necessity of Radio Four, indeed radio in general, were ever called into doubt, this series alone would be evidence to the contrary.

One of the most enlightening things the series did was to choose a significant percentage of the objects from pre-AD periods. The first two million years of the human species tend to get dealt with fairly briskly in most histories - not ignoring the fact that we have vastly less in the way of information and surviving artefacts from these times - but also to get lumped into a few distinct periods based on the famous bits. So there's basically cavemen for, ooh, ages; then eventually there's some Egyptians building pyramids and Babylonian hanging gardens and some Jews in roughly the same region for a bit - oh, and the Chinese are doing some stuff - and then a while later the Greeks and Romans show up and history properly kicks off. What was great about AHOTWIOHO was that we got a full 35% of the objects, and thus the programming, on the pre-Christian world, which would otherwise remain monumentally under-exposed. I had no idea that anybody was even on Papua New Guinea in 2000 BC, let alone that they were producing novelty bird-shaped cookware. Yet a defaced penny from 1903 was similarly interesting.

Some of the objects were familiar, of course, even famous - the Rosetta Stone, the head of Ramesses II, the Lewis chessmen - possibly because of the requirement that all 100 objects came from the British Museum. But of course a collection that contains ancient stone sculptures or hand-made coins should not exclude credit cards and such like. They have as much historical significance, as the programme clearly set forth - I'd never read so much into Hokusai's The Great Wave before, for example.

I'm glad that AHOTWIOHO wasn't made as a television series, because it didn't need to be. The obvious weakness of having a radio series based around visual artefacts was offset by the narration, making the events and ideas signified by the object more important, and by the equally excellent website which allows high-resolution viewing of all the objects from several angles. More importantly, there was no need for the distractions that so often blight 'cultural' programming - overbearing and loud presenters, needless graphics and silly camerawork - based on the assumption that modern attention spans are inadequate for things quite interesting enough to stand on their own. In any case, who would commission a television series lasting a hundred episodes, yet with each only fifteen minutes in length? This is where radio honestly has the upper hand as a medium.

All 100 objects are on display in an exhibition at the British Museum. Best of all, all 100 radio programmes will remain available to listen to or download, hopefully in perpetuity. You can find them here.