David Starkey - Career

Career

Bored at Cambridge and attracted to London's gay scene, in 1972 Starkey moved to the London School of Economics. He claimed to be an "excessively enthusiastic advocate of promiscuity", liberating himself from his mother's intensity; she strongly disapproved of his homosexuality. A 30-year career as a teacher ended in 1998, when, blaming boredom and modern academic life, he gave it up.

Starkey entered the wider public consciousness in 1992 on the BBC Radio 4 debate programme The Moral Maze, where he debated morality with fellow panellists Rabbi Julia Neuberger, Dr Roger Scruton and journalist Janet Daley. He soon acquired a reputation for abrasiveness; he explained in 2007 that his personality possesses "a tendency towards showmanship... towards self-indulgence and explosion and repartee and occasional silliness and going over the top." The Daily Mail gave him the sobriquet of "the rudest man in Britain", although Starkey claims that his character was part of a "convenient image". He once attacked the Archdeacon of York George Austin over "his fatness, his smugness, and his pomposity", but after a nine-year stint on the programme, he left, citing his boredom with being "Dr Rude" and its move to an evening slot. From 1995 he also spent three years at Talk Radio UK, presenting Starkey on Saturday, later Starkey on Sunday. An interview with Denis Healey proved to be one of his most embarrassing moments: "I mistakenly thought that he had become an amiable old buffer who would engage in amusing conversation, and he tore me limb from limb. I laugh about it now, but I didn't feel like laughing about it at the time."

His first television appearance was in 1977, on Granada Television's Behave Yourself, with Russell Harty. He was a prosecution witness in the 1984 ITV programme The Trial of Richard III, whose jury acquitted the king on the grounds of insufficient evidence. His television documentaries on The Six Wives of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I were ratings successes. In 2002 he signed a £2 million contract with Channel 4 to produce 25 hours of television, including Monarchy, a chronicle of the history of English kings and queens from the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms onward. He presented the 2009 series Henry: Mind of a Tyrant, which Independent reviewer Brian Viner called "highly fascinating", although A. A. Gill was less complimentary, calling it "Hello! history", and its presenter "a top-down historian, a nostalgic snob of the sort that collects souvenir egg cups". In an interview about the series for the Radio Times, Starkey complained that too many historians had focussed not on Henry, but his wives. Referring to a "feminised history", he said: "so many of the writers who write about this are women and so much of their audience is a female audience." This prompted historian Lucy Worsley to label his comments as misogynistic. More recently, he taught five history lessons in Channel 4's Jamie's Dream School, after which he criticised the state education system.

The core of history is narrative and biography. And the way history has been presented in the curriculum for the last 25 years is very different. The importance of knowledge has been downgraded. Instead the argument has been that it's all about skills. Supposedly, what you are trying to do with children is inculcate them with the analytical skills of the historian. Now this seems to me to be the most goddamn awful way to approach any subject, and also the most dangerous, and one, of course, that panders to all sorts of easy assumptions - ‘oh we've got the internet, we don't need knowledge anymore because it's so easy to look things up'. Oh no it isn't. In order to think, you actually need the information in your mind. —David Starkey

He presented the 2011 documentary William and Kate: Romance and the Royals, about which The Independent reviewer Amol Rajan was equivocal, although the Telegraph's Benji Wilson claimed he could tell that Starkey "felt that there was something a little tacky about the whole enterprise".

Starkey was in 1994 elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London. He has worked as curator on several exhibitions, including a 2003 exhibit on Elizabeth I, following which he had lunch with her namesake, Elizabeth II. Several years later he told a reporter that the monarch had no interest in her predecessors, other than those who followed her great grandfather. "I don't think she's at all comfortable with anybody - I would hesitate to use the word intellectual - but it's useful. I think she's got elements a bit like Goebbels in her attitude to culture - you remember: 'every time I hear the word culture I reach for my revolver.' I think the queen reaches for her mask." His remarks were criticised by royal biographer Penny Junor and royal historian Robert Lacey.