Erin Bell

Erin Bell works at the University of Lincoln, UK as a Senior Lecturer in History. She initially joined the institution to work with Prof Ann Gray who soon afterwards received AHRC funding for the Televising History 1995-2010 project and co-authored with Prof Gray History on Television,(2013) which offered an overview of the wide range of history-related factual programming on British TV, from children's TV to docudrama, commemorative documentaries to reality history series. Erin continues to research in the areas of early modern (C17th to early C19th) religion and gender, focussing on the representation of minorities and the impact of, usually negative, depictions of the groups, on their lived experiences. She also continues to consider the representation of the past on television; she has received EU funding and worked alongside colleagues from across the continent for the Erasmus Plus 'E-Story' project on the use of IT and filmmaking in secondary school history lessons, whilst also considering the use on television and in news reporting of the short hand term 'Schindler' to depict any civilian involved in rescuing Jews during WW2, for which a focus on gender and religion proved equally useful.

The Brexit collection – the BBC and depictions of history after the 2016 Referendum.

In June 2016, Britain narrowly voted to leave the European Union. In the years afterwards, a range of programming, including news, comedy, drama and documentary, attempted to explain the result and its implications for those living in Britain, and Britons overseas. Whilst this paper does not seek to explain Brexit and its origins, the British media, including broadcasters like the BBC, have made efforts to do so. This paper will, then, offer an analysis of how the oldest UK broadcaster has curated a selection of Brexit-themed broadcasts on its website, but ignored other programming, specifically history documentaries, which offer a less comforting view of past and future events. The implications of this selection will be considered by analysing the content of the 'collection' but also those programmes which are absent. The latter include Northern Irish comedian Patrick Kielty's My dad, the peace deal and me which commemorated the 20th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement but noted inter alia the potential for violence to return post-Brexit. Its absence from the collection, suggests an unwillingness to acknowledge the traumatic past of the UK, and its potential return: it cannot be claimed that 'we' have moved on, a criterion Wodak and Richardson (2009) note as core to national success stories: Brexit remains an unknown, and so its storytellers, it seems, cannot acknowledge trauma.