Dan Snow: ‘The trick of life is only do what you’re good at’ – interview

Written by Rachel on July 2nd, 2011

From the Guardian:

Historian Dan Snow, son of Swingometer Peter, on canvases, castles and why he’s not ‘a complete loon’
   Dan Snow at Conwy Castle in Wales. Photograph: Howard Barlow for the Observer
The 32-year-old historian Dan Snow is the precocious son of Peter “Swingometer” Snow, a three-time veteran of the Boat Race and the BBC’s all-action heir to Schama and Starkey. In November he married the prison-reform campaigner Lady Edwina Grosvenor, Lady Diana’s goddaughter, and has a habit of turning up in the news – last year, for a swashbuckling rescue mission to Calais, where, inspired by a programme he made on the 70th anniversary of Dunkirk, he rocked up in France with three boats to pick up Brits stranded by the Iceland volcano; more recently for his one-man quest to make the AV referendum intelligible with YouTube tutorials. This invites the obvious question: Dan Snow, is there anything that you are not really good at?

“That’s complete nonsense! I’m rubbish at most things,” he snorts, standing neo-heroically, high on the battlements of Conwy Castle in north Wales. “My resumé is actually very narrow, it’s all to do with talking nonsense. I’m terrible at languages, science, ball sports, all sorts of the things, but the trick of life – as I learned from military history – is to reinforce success, only do what you’re good at.”

So, we can add self-effacing to the list. Tonight, we can also see Snow in a slightly different guise. He is one of 11 celebrity presenters given the chance to raid the public-owned art stash for BBC1’s Hidden Paintings. The premise is that 80% of the paintings that belong to us are not on regular display and Snow has chosen to dig out the work of the little-known photo-realist Arthur Spooner from Nottingham (this means, confusingly, that Snow’s film will only be broadcast in the BBC East Midlands region, but all 11 programmes will be available on iPlayer).

“We were lucky enough to go down to the bowels of Nottingham Castle, and Aladdin’s Cave is a term too often used in history television, but there were these dusty, frameless canvases, thousands of works of art of great value,” he says. “It’s a reminder that we have precious museums all round the country and a timely one because they are in real trouble at the moment, on the frontline of the cuts.”

Next up is a series about great castles, which sent Snow to Syria, Poland and now Conwy, and he is developing an interactive TV-internet hybrid that will “hopefully be a bit groundbreaking, but God knows”. You sense, however, that what drives him is the recognition of his peers. “With my last book, some of them started to think I might not be a complete loon after all,” he says. “I’ve got a long way to go, but that’s the dream.”

Check out the episode on iPlayer.

 

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