Dan Snow: I'd die if my kids said they wanted to be broadcasters
Full Disclosure with James O'Brien
Global
4.6 • 3.5K Ratings
🗓️ 22 November 2024
⏱️ 65 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Dan Snow makes history exciting. Whether it’s through his award-winning documentaries, bestselling books, or popular podcast History Hit, he has a gift for bringing the past to life and showing us why it still matters today.
Coming from a family of celebrated journalists—his father is broadcaster Peter Snow and his mother is Canadian journalist Ann MacMillan - Dan was immersed in storytelling from an early age. But what sets him apart isn’t just his passion for history, it’s his ability to look ahead. Spotting how storytelling and broadcasting were changing, he launched History Hit, a streaming platform that’s redefined how we engage with history.
In this episode, Dan talks about growing up in a journalist household, his dad’s attempt to steer him away from broadcasting and why he decided to break away from traditional media. Dan’s new book The Story of England: The Making of a Nation is out now.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is a global player original podcast. |
| 0:12.1 | Hello and welcome to full disclosure, a podcast project designed to let me spend more time with interesting people than I would ever get on the radio program. It strikes me |
| 0:22.7 | Dan Snow, historian, broadcaster, author, that given the changing nature of content production |
| 0:28.8 | during the course of your career, people have probably spent a heck of a lot more time with you |
| 0:33.5 | than would have happened in previous generations. They like you, some people complain they get too much of me. |
| 0:41.8 | What can I say? |
| 0:43.0 | No, I feel I've had a very, you never, you never think you're going to be that strange |
| 0:48.1 | crossover generation when the plates of technological, when those seismic plates change. |
| 0:53.6 | You think, well, all the, all the, all the |
| 0:55.7 | change has occurred. Now, now the future has arrived and I'm part of that future, but actually I look |
| 0:59.3 | back now, and I'm like one of those Victorians who was marvelling at the invention of the railroad. |
| 1:02.9 | So I began, I went, BBC Project, went to Egypt with BBC 2, and they had loads of time for |
| 1:10.4 | research, big, huge team, 15, had loads of time for research, big huge team, |
| 1:12.5 | 15,000 pounds excess baggage for the, on the plane on the way out there. |
| 1:16.4 | We took all sorts of equipment. |
| 1:17.6 | We probably didn't need cranes and jibs and weights for them, assistant camera operators. |
| 1:22.6 | And we spent weeks in Egypt filming in extraordinary detail. |
| 1:26.9 | And now I go out with |
| 1:29.0 | one other team member sometimes just myself |
| 1:30.9 | you've got mics that plug into phones |
| 1:33.0 | you've got phones that have |
| 1:34.4 | we try to calculate the other thing |
... |
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