Bettany Hughes: The History Woman
In her 2011 RTS Huw Wheldon Memorial Lecture, Bettany Hughes recalled an awful meeting at the BBC that could have ended her TV career before it had begun.
It was the 1990s and Hughes felt “history wasn’t getting a fair crack of the whip”. Her pitch to a senior producer “was going down like a cup of cold sick” before he administered the coup de grâce: “One, no one is interested in history any more; two, no one watches history programmes on television; and three, no one wants to be lectured by a woman.”