Those who know me well know how I’ve loved historical television “documentaries,” while those who might know me less well would simply guess it. In recent years - not coincidentally those that involved constant consumption of professional history – the crush subsided a little, but I think I’m glad to say that those emotions are trickling back. Of late, I’ve just finished the first series of
Mud Men, a History Channel Britain production, pushing through it in a manner I’ve usually only done for scripted dramas and comedies.
That I’ve used the word “series” (British for “season”) hints at a change in the game that occurred while I took my hiatus. While much of the consumed content of my youth appeared under the aegis of an umbrella brand – A & E’s Mysteries of the Bible and PBS’ Empires are the first to come to mind – none of it could properly constitute anything approaching season/series based television with characters and continuity, though, as one might expect, many of the specialist personages to grace the screen appeared repeatedly. Each contribution, however, appeared as if independent from the rest. The human beings acted less as characters than as a sort of mutant chorus, their sometimes zany charisma providing commentary to break up spates of sonorous narration and heavy dramatization. We came to take in the past as it might have played out, our contemporaries there only to thicken the context, not to play a part,
Newer history reality programming keeps the same primary goal but, in the person of the host, uses the two-thousand-teen personage as something of a stand-in for the audience. Each episode begins with his or her curiosity about the subject at hand then chronicles his process of satisfying that inquisitive urge through visits to scholars, architectural pilgrimages, and video dramatizations. When he or she exhibits awe or discomfort, we’re primed to feel it too. The set up – and this is why I like it – makes the activity a personal interaction with the material. Whereas the narrator-dramatization-scholar model mostly acted as enhanced lectures, imparting history onto the passive audience, the host’s-journey approach acts more like a first-person-shooter video game, having the audience take on the past as it affects them today. It makes sense, too, given that our age makes information easy, but tangible experiences of that information all the more difficult.*
Mud Men takes the formula a leap further. It has two hosts instead of one, the conceit being that the one, Johnny Vaughn, wanting to become a “mud lark,” (an amateur archaeologist of the Thames foreshore) apprentices himself to the other, Steve Brooker aka “Mud God,” chairman of London’s mudlark society. The approach allows them to develop personalities and a personal dynamic beyond what a single host investigating a single question can allow. The end result heightens the empathic experience, paradoxically ratcheting up both a sense of distance between past and present and the feel of experiencing ages lost.
Each episode begins at a specific spot along the Thames within the greater London region. Jonny’s voice-over (he’s apparently something of a known radio and television host over there?) introduces the show’s conceit and region’s past in one fell swoop. The monologue ends with the hosts at shore level, where the Jonny’s apprenticeship takes focus. Steve reiterates the historical significance of the spot, what they might expect to find, then sets his ward to work with a trowel and bucket, taunting him for the paucity of his finds and inability to see the traces of objects right before his eyes. Jonny, for his part, treats each of his finds like the Holy Grail and whines for Steve to play hot-or-cold with him when his untrained vision fails him.
His palpable excitement puts the viewer along the foreshore especially when it over-steps the bounds of reality. In first episode he swears a tiny brass bugle he’s found must be Roman in origin, that to have made such a find on his first day surely marks him out to but a mudlarking prodigy. Our sense of childlike wonder heightens with Steve’s reaction, part indulgent smile, part condescending smirk. Their relationship in these opening moments takes on something of a parent-child, or at least big-little brother, relationship, at times filled with the chastisement, pride, and mutual excitement that comes from watching another grow up. All the while, Steve remains the amateur, an experienced hand but something far less than an awe-inducing expert, partly because he’s covered in sediment and partly because he clearly doesn’t know it all – his origin story for the phrase “bite the bullet” as a method to modify another man’s munitions for one’s own weapon makes this eminently clear.
Importantly so, for the digging duo heads next to the Mudlark Pub to meet with a heavily bearded expert on seemingly every aspect of British material culture from every moment in time about the day’s find. Here they both take the on the posture of novitiate awe before chasing down the stories of their objects with curator and historian experts in the field, first as individuals then as a team pursuing a typical experience of the past in the episode’s final segment.
Their individual journeys are fun and informative, especially as neither holds back his wonder and wit with their expert interlocuters,** but the experience reaches its height when they reconvene. The dynamic changes entirely, as Jonny, with his endless stream of words and confident posture, consistently manipulates sad-sack Steve to take the worst of the affair. When one of them must learn to butcher a lamb as one might have in the sixteenth century, Steve gets the privilege of handling the blade and entrails while Jonny sprints from the hut with every blast of noxious odor. When someone must enter the stocks, or experience a Tudor torture board, Steve finds himself taking the pain. Occasionally the dynamic alters – when they re-enact a Georgian duel with paintball guns, Steve keeps pulling his trigger well after his first hit in revenge for the rest – but ultimately we close with Steve wondering what exactly he signed up for in agreeing to mentor the TV host.
Where the opening reminds us of parent and child, the close more resembles the stereotypical relationship between jock and nerd. Heightened by subaltern emotions, the actions feel all the more dirty and humiliating. There’s certainly fun being had, but with the constant reminder that for those who existed long ago, life kind of sucked. For whatever reason, the dynamic robs re-enactment of romantic voyeurism and renders it more human. I’ve seen single hosts do similar things, but even the most evocative of their attempts – here I think particularly of an episode of
Filthy Cities where the host trampled on oddly platformed wooden sandals through a foot of manure and compost – feel foreign compared to the sight of poor Steve (all 6’6 of him!) crammed into the boiler room of a steam-powered river boat. At the same time, the dynamic heightens the ephemerality of the moment - we know that Steve and Jonny are “mates,” that at the beginning of the next day Steve will again be on top on the banks of the river. The historical experience might feel less foreign, but ultimately it is; we’ll feel it for now, but then it’ll be gone, just another phase of two friends’ story in the present.
Mud Men is often funny – lanky working class Steve made up and dressed as an Eighteenth Century dandy trying to hail a cab in Canary Wharf might be a hacky gag, but it’s a great one – and is consistently informative – who knew that the nails that held together British ships haven’t changed from the Middle Ages, making them impossible to date? – a combination which places it in the highest range of what is ultimately an educational genre. But what makes it truly excellent, an iteration of “reality” programming worth thinking about and recommending derives from the hosts and their relationship. Jonny’s wonder and Steve’s humiliation both allow insights relating to the past, the former stressing the persistence of its presence while the latter speaks to its loss.
*I should note that there exists also a counter-trend in the same vein of reaction, where the show (here I think of BBC’s recent series on Versailles) goes full-on dramatization, focusing intensely on the historical characters’ interior personalities within and against events and uses its scholars like off-scene psychologists to thicken the plot.
**It helps that they’ve chosen a good batch of experts, ones able to riff and banter as well as they explain.
