Adrian Chiles’s article concerning the use of the present tense in television history programmes (I love history programmes. But there’s one trend that makes my blood boil …, 6 September) not only does a disservice to TV historians such as Dan Gold, who “writes history in the present tense” (Letters, 11 September), but also to the innovation and flexibility of the English language.
Chiles takes issue with the apparently nonsensical use of the present tense to describe the past. He gives the invented example, “Napoleon walks into the room to find Josephine playing strip poker with her young lover. Napoleon’s so upset he gets someone to kill her dog.” But Chiles is missing a culturally significant and very useful aspect of the present tense, which is its widespread use to describe the immediacy or perceived recency of that which is being observed or talked about.
In the TV history programme, the events seen on screen are immediate and so it is culturally conventional to use the present tense to talk about them, just as it is culturally conventional in football commentary and joke telling. For example, “Palacios kicks the ball long to Messi,” or, “A penguin walks into a bar.” Imagine the inimitable Motty if he had rigidly confined himself to the past tense when he commentated, instead of using the present simple or the present perfect simple, for there is no doubt that, as he spoke, nearly all of the events were in the past.
If Chiles detests TV historians discussing dramatised historical events on the screen in the present tense, then I am sure he would detest it still more if football commentary followed his temporal prescriptivism and used the past: “They thought it was all over, well it was when the referee blew his whistle a few moments ago.”
Many of the best jokes I heard at school also used the present tense. It is the English language’s way of conveying immediacy and putting the hearer directly in the action. That is why TV history uses it, and that is why commentators and barristers use it too.
John O’Regan
Professor of critical applied linguistics, Institute of Education, University College London
• Adrian Chiles and your correspondents miss two far more aggravating aspects of modern documentary. First, they wash muzak over everything, revealing that they have not recorded decent sound on the day. Second, they have done away with many knowledgable people. When a vaguely familiar face says “I’m on a journey …”, I switch off.
Simon Allen
Wendover, Buckinghamshire
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