Michael Wood | |
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Born | Michael David Wood 23 July 1948 Moss Side, Manchester, England |
Education | Manchester Grammar School |
Alma mater | Oriel College, University of Oxford (B A.) |
Occupation(s) | Historian, broadcaster, documentary filmmaker |
Notable work | In Search of the Dark Ages (1979) Great Railway Journeys (1980) In Search of the Trojan War (1985) In the Footsteps of Alexander the Great (1998) The Story of India (2007) In Search of Beowulf (2009) The Story of England (2010) The Story of China (2016) |
Michael David Wood, OBE , FSA (born 23 July 1948) is an English historian and broadcaster. He has presented numerous well-known television documentary series from the late 1970s to the present day. Wood has also written a number of books on English history, including In Search of the Dark Ages , The Domesday Quest, The Story of England , and In Search of Shakespeare. [1] [2] He was appointed Professor of Public History at the University of Manchester in 2013.
Wood was born in Moss Side, Manchester, England.[ citation needed ] He attended Heald Place Primary School in Rusholme. When he was eight, his family moved to Paulden Avenue, Wythenshawe, where he could see historic Baguley Hall from his bedroom window. He went to Benchill Primary School. At Manchester Grammar School, he developed an interest in theatre, playing Grusha in the first British amateur production of Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle and later Hamlet in Shakespeare's Hamlet . He took A-levels in English, French and History. [3]
Wood studied history and English at Oriel College, Oxford, touring the United States for six weeks in his final year, and graduated with a second-class Bachelor of Arts degree. Later, he undertook postgraduate research in Anglo-Saxon history at Oriel. Three years into his research for a DPhil, he left to become a journalist with ITV. [1] [3]
In the 1970s, Wood worked for the BBC in Manchester. He was first a reporter and then an assistant producer on current affairs programmes before returning to his love of history with his 1979–81 series In Search of the Dark Ages for BBC2. [4] He quickly became popular with female viewers for his blond good looks (he was humorously dubbed "the thinking woman's crumpet" by British newspapers), his deep voice and his habit of wearing tight jeans and a sheepskin jacket. [5] Wood's work is also well known in the United States, where it is often broadcast on PBS and on various cable television networks. The series Legacy (1992) is one of his more frequently broadcast documentaries on US television.
Since 1990, Wood has been a director of independent television production company Maya Vision International. In 2006, he joined the British School of Archaeology in Iraq campaign, the aim of which was to train and encourage new Iraqi archaeologists, and he has lectured on the subject. [6] In 2013, Wood joined the University of Manchester as Professor of Public History. [7]
Wood favours returning artefacts looted during the age of imperialism. He has publicly supported moving the Elgin Marbles from the British Museum back to Attica. [8]
His girlfriend for ten years, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, was the journalist and broadcaster Pattie Coldwell. [9] [10] He currently lives in north London with his wife, television producer Rebecca Ysabel Dobbs, and two daughters, Minakshi and Jyoti. [11]
Wood was a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society [1] until 2007. [12] [13] In 2009, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Arts by Sunderland University. [14] This was followed by the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters by the University of Leicester in 2011 and in 2015 he was awarded the President's Medal by the British Academy. [15]
Having previously been President of the Leicestershire Archaeological and Historical Society, in 2017 he accepted the position of Honorary Life Vice President, offered in recognition of his work on the documentary series Michael Wood's Story of England . [16] Wood is currently the president of the Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding, an organization founded in 1965 to promote understanding and friendship between the British and the Chinese people.
Wood was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 2008. [17]
Wood was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2021 New Year Honours for services to public history and broadcasting. [18] He expressed that an opportunity had been missed to replace the word Empire with Excellence in OBE. [19]
BAFTA-winning broadcaster David Olusoga has said that he was inspired as a teenager to become a historian by having watched Wood on television. [20]
Mellitus was the first bishop of London in the Saxon period, the third archbishop of Canterbury, and a member of the Gregorian mission sent to England to convert the Anglo-Saxons from their native paganism to Christianity. He arrived in 601 AD with a group of clergy sent to augment the mission, and was consecrated as Bishop of London in 604. Mellitus was the recipient of a famous letter from Pope Gregory I known as the Epistola ad Mellitum, preserved in a later work by the medieval chronicler Bede, which suggested the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons be undertaken gradually, integrating pagan rituals and customs. In 610, Mellitus returned to Italy to attend a council of bishops, and returned to England bearing papal letters to some of the missionaries.
Sir David Courtney Suchet is an English actor. He is known for his work on stage and in television. He portrayed Edward Teller in the television serial Oppenheimer (1980) and received the RTS and BPG awards for his performance as Augustus Melmotte in the British serial The Way We Live Now (2001). International acclaim and recognition followed his performance as Agatha Christie's detective Hercule Poirot in Agatha Christie's Poirot (1989–2013), for which he received a 1991 British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) nomination.
The Battle of Brunanburh was fought in 937 between Æthelstan, King of England, and an alliance of Olaf Guthfrithson, King of Dublin; Constantine II, King of Scotland; and Owain, King of Strathclyde. The battle is sometimes cited as the point of origin for English national identity: historians such as Michael Livingston argue that "the men who fought and died on that field forged a political map of the future that remains, arguably making the Battle of Brunanburh one of the most significant battles in the long history not just of England, but of the whole of the British Isles."
Carenza Rachel Lewis is a British academic archaeologist and television presenter.
At the Battle of Edington, an army of the kingdom of Wessex under Alfred the Great defeated the Great Heathen Army led by the Dane Guthrum sometime between 6 and 12 May 878, resulting in the Treaty of Wedmore later the same year. Primary sources locate the battle at "Eðandun". Until a scholarly consensus linked the battle site with the present-day village of Edington in Wiltshire, it was known as the Battle of Ethandun. This name continues to be used.
Sub-Roman Britain is the period of late antiquity in Great Britain between the end of Roman rule and the Anglo-Saxon settlement. The term was originally used to describe archaeological remains found in 5th- and 6th-century AD sites that hinted at the decay of locally made wares from a previous higher standard under the Roman Empire. It is now used to describe the period that commenced with the recall of Roman troops to Gaul by Constantine III in 407 and to have concluded with the Battle of Deorham in 577.
Stuart John Maconie is an English radio DJ and television presenter, writer, journalist, and critic working in the field of pop music and popular culture. He is a presenter on BBC Radio 6 Music where, alongside Mark Radcliffe, he hosts its weekend breakfast show which broadcasts from the BBC's MediaCityUK in Salford. The pair previously presented an evening show on BBC Radio 2 and the weekday afternoon show for BBC Radio 6 Music.
Joseph Hunter was a Unitarian Minister, antiquarian, and deputy keeper of public records now best known for his publications Hallamshire. The History and Topography of the Parish of Sheffield in the County of York, the two-volume South Yorkshire , still considered among the best works written on the history of Sheffield and South Yorkshire, and his 1852 pamphlet on Robin Hood in which he argued that a servant of this name at the court of Edward II was identical with the famous outlaw. His name was adopted by the Hunter Archaeological Society.
Anglo-Saxon England or Early Medieval England covers the period from the end of Roman Britain in the 5th century until the Norman Conquest in 1066. It consisted of various Anglo-Saxon kingdoms until 927, when it was united as the Kingdom of England by King Æthelstan. It became part of the short-lived North Sea Empire of Cnut, a personal union between England, Denmark and Norway, in the 11th century.
Patricia Ann Coldwell, known as Pattie Coldwell, was a British TV presenter and journalist.
William D. Rubinstein was an American-British historian and author. His best-known work, Men of Property: The Very Wealthy in Britain Since the Industrial Revolution, charts the rise of the 'super rich', a class he saw as expanding exponentially.
St Michael's Flags and Angel Meadow Park is a public park in Manchester, England, to the immediate northeast of the city centre, on a slope between the River Irk and Rochdale Road. It occupies an area of 7.4 acres (3 ha), and was once an affluent suburb, until the 19th-century Industrial Revolution altered the social standing of the area and introduced poverty and disease. Regeneration of the park in the 2000s has created a gateway into the Irk Valley.
Wuffa is recorded in the Anglo-Saxon genealogies as an early king of East Anglia. If historical, he would have lived in the 6th century.
Henry Royston Loyn, FBA, was a British historian specialising in the history of Anglo-Saxon England. His eminence in his field made him a natural candidate to run the Sylloge of the Coins of the British Isles, which he chaired from 1979 to 1993. He was Professor of Medieval History in the University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire and afterwards Professor of Medieval History at Westfield College in the University of London.
Graham Phillips is a British author. Phillips has a background working as a reporter for BBC radio, and he was the Founding Editor (1979) of Strange Phenomena magazine. He has made a number of controversial claims concerning the Arthurian legend, such as the discovery of the 'Hawkstone Grail', a small stone cup that he claims is the original Holy Grail; the identification of a Roman ruin as the "historical Camelot"; and the claim to have discovered King Arthur's grave. He has also investigated various biblical mysteries, again presenting some controversial theories, such as an alternative location for Mount Sinai at Petra in Jordan, an Egyptian staff in a British museum as the staff of Moses, and a grave on the British island of Anglesey as the tomb of the Virgin Mary.
In Search of the Dark Ages is a BBC television documentary series, written and presented by historian Michael Wood, first shown between 1979 and 1981. It comprises eight short films across two series, each focusing on a particular character from the history of England prior to the Norman Conquest, a period popularly known as the Dark Ages. It is also the title of a book written by Wood to support the series, that was first published in 1981.
The Great British Story: A People's History is a 2012 documentary in eight parts written and presented by Michael Wood looking at history through the eyes of ordinary people airing on the BBC.
Eorpeburnan is the first place identified in the Burghal Hidage, a document created in the late 9th or early 10th century, that provides a list of thirty one fortified places in Wessex. It details the location of fortifications designed to defend the West Saxon kingdom from the Vikings but also the relative size of burghal defences and their garrisons. Eorpeburnan is designated as having a hidage of 324, its precise location is lost in history, but scholars have suggested some possible sites.
Graham Holderness is a writer and critic who has published as author or editor 60 books, mostly on Shakespeare, and hundreds of chapters and articles of criticism, theory and theology. He was one of the founders of British Cultural materialism, a pioneer of critical-creative writing, and a significant contributor to interdisciplinary work in Literature and Theology.
David Adetayo Olusoga is a British historian, writer and broadcaster. He is Professor of Public History at the University of Manchester. Olusoga has presented historical documentaries on the BBC and contributed to The One Show and The Guardian.