The opening minutes of The Great British Story: A People's History (BBC Two, Friday, 9pm) featured film shot at Central Station in Glasgow 100 years ago.
The footage was faded and flickery but you could still make out the details: a woman pushing a pram, a man reading the paper, a child looking up at the great glass ceiling. And under the big clock, someone was probably waiting to meet a friend, like they still do.
Anyone who's ever been to Central Station will know that it looks pretty much the same today, and it was this feeling of continuity that seemed to haunt most of the programme – the feeling that parts of Britain and British life look and act and feel the same as they did a century ago. The feeling was there again when we were shown pictures of crowds waving Union Flags on VE Day; they could have been waving them for Jessica Ennis or Chris Hoy.
The point of it all was that we, the British, are still affected by the fact we were made a long ago time – designed and riveted together when the Empire was at its height, particularly in Glasgow where much of the programme was filmed.
Michael Wood visited Govan, for example, and related how what had been a village where people went to paint watercolours became an industrial hub employing 19,000 people – ships built the Empire and the Empire built ships, and our identity. The more important point was that, despite the catastrophic decline in shipbuilding, that identity is still there. You just have to speak to anyone in Govan to know it.
What Wood did as he hopped between Glasgow and Manchester was explore how this identity, made by industry, was strengthened and spread: it was through workplaces obviously, but also organisations such as the Boys' Brigade and the Labour Party. Even as the great industries struggled and died and a new consumer society emerged, it was still the Empire – or rather the loss of it – that was defining us. It was doing exactly the same thing when millions of people from the former colonies came to the mother country in the 1950s. Always, this small island defined by how big our influence used to be.
It was just a pity that there wasn't more of this kind of analysis at the end of what has been a long but slightly frustrating series. If you're going to fit the history of a nation into eight episodes, it's inevitable that you're going to have a kind of greatest hits of history rather than profound analysis, and with The Great British Story, we have had lot of Google facts but very little in the way of new and interesting insights into Britain and who we are.
And now that the series is over, it is probably this idea that the Empire has built us – this democratic, ecumenical, liberal place – that will linger. Indeed, it feels particularly relevant in these past few weeks as cyclists and runners and javelin throwers have waved the Union flags at the spectators and they waved Union flags back at them. It feels like proof that, small as we are, the big story of the Empire still rules us.
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