When I was eight or nine years old there was a
tradition in my boarding-school dormitory of telling stories after
‘lights out’. One boy called Holdsworth was brilliant at making up
ghost stories, and was in constant demand. I lacked his imagination,
but once I had heard a story I could remember it and repeat it later.
Now, half a century later, I am paid to do just that – retell stories
that I have heard from other people.
All animals communicate, but apart from humans,
no other animals can tell stories; indeed it seems that the ability to
remember events and turn them into a story is one of the unique
abilities that makes us human – so story-telling is immensely
important.
Australian Aborigines have an extraordinary oral
tradition known as Dreamtime, a set of legends that tell of the
creation of the universe, the origins of people and other animals,
rules for survival, and the pleasures and pains of human existence.
These stories, together with paintings, dances, and songs, have been
passed on from one generation to the next for thousands of years –
some say for 60,000 years.
The first people to write things down, as far as
we know, were the Sumerians in what is now southern Iraq, around 5000
yeas ago. Using cuneiform script they wrote not only bills and
receipts and laws, but also epic tales. The world’s oldest written
story is the legend of Gilgamesh, a hero who set off to search for
immortality, and met a series of adventures on the way. One part of
this story tells of a catastrophic flood, and a man building a boat to
survive it – a close parallel of Noah and the flood in the Bible;
perhaps both stories originated in some genuine event in the distant
past.
The technology of recording stories positively
encouraged the story-tellers, and the Romans took it up with
enthusiasm. In Rome stands a magnificent pillar called Trajan’s Column
– there’s a replica in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London –
which recounts the Emperor Trajan’s military achievements carved as
pictures in stone, like a three-dimensional cartoon strip. It’s
incredibly detailed, and shows just how Roman soldiers made bread,
built forts and used pontoon bridges – more like an IKEA instruction
manual than a legend; this is documentary story-telling, which is what
I try to do in my radio and tv programmes.
