Fred Flintstone invented the Bessemer converter...

...and Roger Rabbit defeated the French at the battle of the Somme.

You know, there is definitely something wrong when statements like the two above do not seem particularly out of the ordinary when compared to the results of a poll on history run recently by the Beeb.

Almost half of 16- to 34-year-olds questioned in a BBC poll did not know that Francis Drake led the English fleet against Spain. One in five 16 to 24-year-olds thought it was Columbus, while one in 20 said it was Gandalf, the wizard from Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.

Crazy no? Some of the respondents had no idea that the Romans ever set foot in Britain and others thought that the Battle of Britain was fought against France in the Hundred Years War. Phew, there were a lot of planes involved in that one I can tell you.

Peter Furtado, the editor of History Today magazine thinks he knows what’s going on:

Since the collapse of the grand Whig narrative that Churchill was talking about in A History of the English-Speaking Peoples and which went out of favour with the rise of multi-cultural Britain, it's been very difficult for anybody to construct a large story of Britain.

It’s an interesting take on the matter though I am not sure how much it actually contributes to the current mess.

Of course, the solution is to get The Simpsons to do a few episodes a year on the History of Britain. After all, they did a grand job of keeping us informed when the Cylons last attacked the Earth.

Posted by John at August 5, 2004 01:21 PM | TrackBack