Neil Oliver is a bit uncomfortable about the jacket of his new book, A History
of Scotland, written to accompany the second part of the £2m BBC television
project of the same name.
“It’s the first time I’ve ever had my face on the cover of a book,” he says.
“There is something funny about seeing yourself like that.”
It’s not strictly true. Both of the books he wrote with Tony Pollard to
accompany his breakthrough television series, Two Men in a Trench, featured
Oliver on the cover, but then it was side-on, in fancy dress, his face
obscured by a helmet.
Seeing Oliver’s dark, brooding good looks superimposed on a view of Eilean
Donan Castle is an acknowledgement of what has been obvious for some time
now. Oliver, who made his name presenting the hit series Coast, has become
almost as big a hero in the world of Scottish history as Bonnie Prince
Charlie or Robert the Bruce. It was his exploits as much as theirs that
encouraged 600,000 Scots to tune in to each episode of the previous series.
In the flesh, Oliver is smoother than his rugged portrait suggests. There is
one other tiny detail not obvious initially: the wedding band on the third
finger of his left hand. A fortnight ago, he married his long-term partner
and the mother of his three children, Trudi Wallace.
“We got married 23 years to the day since we met,” he says. “We’d been
planning to do it for a long time. We either had the time but not the money
or we had the money but not the time. It was a very traditional affair, near
Dollar. We had our honeymoon in Paris. My mother-in-law, God love her, took
the kids.”
For Trudi, it was a rare opportunity to spend four uninterrupted days with her
new husband. Filming Coast and A History of Scotland, not to mention one-off
specials such as Cleopatra: Portrait of a Killer, takes him away for up to
seven days at a time.
“The past two years, with Coast and History of Scotland, I was absolutely
maxed out,” he says. “I could not have filmed another minute. At times it
was overwhelming. I had the book to write as well.”
Should Trudi and their three young children — Evie, 6, Archie, 3, and Teddy,
18 months — need reminding of what he looks like, they can always switch on
the television. For the past two years, Oliver has been a near-ubiquitous
presence on the terrestrial channels. So many series of Coast have been
filmed that the producers have run out of British coastline and have had to
resort to filching other people’s. Oliver has already been to Scandinavia.
The next series will see him head across the channel to France.
But not everybody has the same degree of affection for him as the BBC and his
coterie of female fans. His job presenting what has been billed as the
definitive series on Scottish history has raised the hackles of some in the
world of academia.
The original series, which covered the period until the Union, was the subject
of a well-publicised spat when Tom Devine, the Sir William Fraser professor
of Scottish history and paleography at Edinburgh University, complained
about using “an-archeologist-turned-journalist” to present the programmes
rather than a heavyweight academic historian. Devine has stated he will be
watching the new series very carefully as it “enters my period of
expertise”. Round two seems inevitable.
Oliver, who got a 2:1 in archeology from Glasgow University, is disarmingly
frank about his lack of credentials. “I’m not a great expert in anything,”
he says. “I’ve never lectured so I don’t have that style of delivery. I’m
not an expert on 1,200 years of Scottish history. I was acquiring a lot of
this as I went along. Maybe that gives it an immediacy. As a journalist, you
learn to become an expert for 10 minutes on a subject. It’s a journalistic
rather than an academic approach.”
Like his namesake Jamie, Oliver was discovered by screen queen Pat Llewellyn,
of Optomen Television. Both Olivers exude an unquantifiable essence that can
be detected only through the lens of a camera. They share a populist,
common-touch approach undercut by a strong sense of idealism.
Oliver admits there is nothing in the new series that will come as a surprise
to Scottish academics.
“The work of people like Tom Devine and others have debunked the old myths. We
are just putting that out into the public domain. I think that is where some
of the conflict between us and some of the academics has arisen. What we are
doing is bringing into the public domain ideas and notions that have been
current in their small circle for some time now. What was being said in the
programmes was being held up as ‘new’ and as far as they were concerned, it
wasn’t. That ruffled a lot of feathers.”
It is a surprise to learn that the two men have never met. Why does Oliver
think that Devine has been so sniffy about him? “Maybe that’s just the way
Tom Devine is,” he says. “If you make your living in the world of history,
perhaps you get a bit territorial. Judging by some of the remarks, he is a
man with a fork in a world full of soup.”
The spat has not hurt the ratings. Oliver puts the success of the previous
series down to the fact that the future of the nation was already under
discussion. The new series, a collaboration with the Open University that
has radio and online back-up, is eagerly anticipated. It covers the
Covenanters, the Jacobite rebellions, the Scots colonialists and the tobacco
lords, the loss of Scots identity and the rise of heavy industry, and ends
with the reopening of the Scottish parliament.
He sidesteps the inevitable questions about politics and the future of
Scotland. “I am not politically minded,” he says. “I never have been. I’m
interested in watching politicians as a species — like wildlife — but it
would be inappropriate for me to pontificate about politics in the context
of a nationwide programme.”
However superficial the historians may feel Oliver’s approach is, the
combination of filming Coast and Scotland’s history has given him a unique
insight into the geography and the past of the country. He has, in a sense,
touched the soul of Scotland.
“It’s hard to talk about it without sounding cliched,” he says, “but it has
changed my life. There can be very few people who have seen as much of the
country — not just Scotland, but Britain — as I have in the past 24 months.
That has an effect on you. It concentrates the essence of the country. It’s
a very intense flavour compressed into a short space of time.”
He came away from the series feeling “almost ridiculously proud”. A History of
Scotland took him to France, Italy, North America and Jamaica. “You got the
sense that Scotland really mattered,” he says. “This rocky, wind-blasted,
wave-bashed bit of Britain changed everything and you are left with a
buoyed-up sense of the importance of the country. Scotland’s been
everywhere, done everything.”
It’s a view of the nation so deeply at odds with Scotland’s sense of its own
past and so far removed from the image of a Scotland racked by social
problems that it comes as a surprise.
“Tom Devine has famously railed against what he calls the ‘victim mentality’.
He’s definitely right,” says Oliver. “Scots have learnt to revel in defeat.
We love being glorious underdogs. There have been so many tragic encounters
and we as a nation seem to have found a way of looking at them as glorious
defeats. They have come to overshadow the story. You can’t see the bigger
picture for the emphasis that has been put upon the defeats. There has been
a tendency to wallow.”
Despite his flowing Jacobite locks and obvious romantic streak, Oliver is keen
to tackle Scotland’s victim status head-on. “Scotland was up to its neck in
slavery,” he says. “William Wallace and Robert the Bruce had dreadful
aspects to their personalities that allowed them to do terrible things —
murdering kids and wiping out whole communities just to make a point. But
it’s like falling in love with someone. You inevitably find that they have
done things in their past which are not great but that intensifies the
experience. It’s the bitter with the sweet. It becomes part of why you
love them. It’s like that with history. The fact that you have done dreadful
deeds as a people just makes the whole thing richer.”
For decades, Scots have used their history to justify their status as the
injured party. It has fed a sense of hopelessness and fatalism. Oliver is
keen to use history to prove the opposite. He argues that the whole idea of
the pursuit of happiness is not American, but Scottish — dating back to
Francis Hutcheson, who was appointed the chair of moral philosophy at
Glasgow University in 1729. One of the fathers of the Enlightenment,
Hutcheson lectured that to be happy, you should devote yourself to the
happiness of others. Happiness was something that people were entitled to
and should defend, he believed.
So how does Oliver think we can reclaim our ancient birthright and become a
shiny, happy nation again? “Maybe people should get out more,” he says. “For
me it’s about the landscape. It’s such an ancient place. Some of the most
ancient rocks on the planet are in Scotland. That should affect a person.
People should go out and have a look.”
The History of Scotland project is now over and there is a debate as to
whether there will be a sixth series of Coast. Oliver jokes that he finds
himself unemployed. There are plenty of offers but he’s not sure what will
be next. “I’m always kind of unemployed,” he says. “I’m always just waiting
for the next project. I’m always on the lookout for a big project that has
some muscle behind it.”
A veteran of battlefield archeology, he is relaxed about the inevitable fight
with academia the new series will provoke. The big guns are trained on him.
To their chagrin, the “archeologist-turned-journalist” will for ever be the
history man.
A History of Scotland begins on BBC Scotland on Sunday November 8 at 9pm
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