Good heavens to Bertha, I seem to have made history! Which is to say, I have somehow managed to publish a whole second book AND recorded and edited an entire audiobook within the same year as my gorgeous official Fry & Laurie history SOUPY TWISTS!

My most committed FANS – hi, Tiddles! – may have noted that the magazine industry has dealt rather cruelly with me of late, and in June, I found myself back in the fully-self-employed bracket once again for the first time in six long years. However, this time, it’s with a mortgage and toddler to support, living remotely out in the Somerset sticks – not as a foot-loose bachelor living in the city of Bath (which was tough enough for several years). I regret to report that finding any kind of sturdy editorial work in a shrinking industry that seems to be on the verge of an AI tsunami is not so far proving to be an overly simple proposition. In short, it’s not a fun state of affairs.

Some losers may have reacted to this dire and petrifying situation by sitting on their glutes playing videogames or watching Jeremy bleedin’ Vine, but even with a three-year-old to look after throughout the school holidays, instead… I just happen to have edited, recorded and audio-edited HISTORIES OF BRITAIN. 

Something of a sister book to TALES OF BRITAIN, this fresh new anthology of the most ancient writings about this Great landmass actually started out as an audiobook concept, and then had to be reverse-engineered as a print paperback and ebook (not just because Audible’s rules make it impossible for any book NOT on Kindle to get uploaded).

My original idea was simply to try to bring to life the dusty old writings of The Venerable Bede, Gildas, Nennius and other scribes of crucial texts that hitherto seem to have NEVER been recorded for audio. Having narrated all of my own existing books, and sadly not being rich enough to have time to sit down and write my hoped-for eighth book right now, naturally, looking for fresh new ways of making the most of my home studio set-up has been a priority, and to be the first man to perform the screeds of these centuries-dead propagandists was too delicious a concept to ignore. This was virgin snow – I was going to become The Venerable Bede, Julius Caesar, Gildas. What a creative challenge!

My number one ambition in life has always been simply to make a living from reading out loud. It’s certainly what I’m best at, and doing so gives me endless pleasure. That has been the one constant throughout my childhood, education and adult career – reading aloud, for entertainment, and education. Only a few short weeks ago, a neighbour asked me to visit the local day care centre where she works to perform one of my stories – The Very Talented Chicken – for a vast group of disabled adults and their carers, and it seemed to go down a real treat with them all. I’ve been stopped in the street and congratulated on the stories I read. And for this I of course neither received nor requested any payment whatsoever – but it is precisely the kind of thing a proper Universal Basic Income could allow people like me to do; to be a useful part of the community, a community peopled with folk all doing what they do best, to spread a little happiness. I mean, I am doing it anyway, but in a functioning society, I would be allowed to make a living this way.  JSA isn’t quite the same.

Any which way but brief, in lieu of paid work, my only option has been to try and get as much – please excuse the term, I’ve been spending far too much time on LinkedIn – top quality CONTENT created and up online as I possibly can, in the hope that ultimately I will have enough items for sale that they will unite to become genuine ongoing income, to help support my family and keep us going. 

HISTORIES OF BRITAIN is anything but just an attempt to make cash though, obviously – or it wouldn’t be me doing it. One thing I can safely say is that if the name ‘Jem Roberts’, or indeed ‘JF Roberts’, appears on something, blood has been sweated, and not a gram of cynical money-grubbing has played a part in its creation. This, like all my books, has been a labour of love.

When writing The True History of the Black Adder, I was lucky to get to flex my muscles as a British historian for the first time, taking an earnestly academic look at how the Blackadder chronicles outright lied as well as distorting truth, and I got to interview great historians like Terry Jones, Justin Pollard and so on. All my life, the idea of distorting truth for propaganda or entertainment purposes has always been a major fascination of mine – these days, obviously, just watching the news, especially on the BBC, requires anyone with a brain to filter everything they see and hear, and investigate the amount of honesty in what is being presented to them as ‘truth’ by a bunch of genocidal liars. HISTORIES OF BRITAIN is here to show us that nothing ever changes…

Which is to say that History is actually changing all the time… British history perhaps more than that of most other countries. 21st century historians have belatedly placed much-needed emphasis on amplifying all the under- or unheard voices which have been hushed by the Powers That Have Been for generations – the victims of British Imperialism and totalitarian regimes both at home and around the British Empire, and indeed all those who have historically been drowned out by rich white straight men. Let me tell you now that this collection of writings – certainly by white men, though their sexualities may be moot – is not here to in any way undermine that, and to push these incredibly stale male voices back to the fore, but simply to remind us all of how far British history has come. It’s crucial to know where we’re coming from if we want real change, so if you want to tell the British story afresh in the 21st century, you would be wise to ingest this authoritative primer on the real roots of our island story. 

As I say, I have always loved reading aloud above anything else – many years ago, I recall I spooked myself very badly by spending an afternoon performing ‘The Jack The Ripper Diaries’ to myself. I really went there. You can enter a kind of fugue state, with your personality supplanted by the voice and words of the person or character narrating the book in question. This audiobook experience is somewhat similar, bringing to life long, long dead texts, and trying to magically give new life to the voices of historians who were all dust even before the Norman Conquest.

I’m not insane, of course, I am intellectually aware that it is strictly nonsensical that I have performed Caesar’s diaries et al with (attempts at) modern accents. The first British historian we have on record, the grouchy monk Gildas, may have come from the Kingdom of Strathclyde, or from sub-Roman Cheshire, but he certainly wouldn’t have the Glaswegian twang I gave him, any more than a modern Welsh accent delivering English verbiage could have been understood in 8th century Cymru. All British accents have changed hugely just in the last few centuries, so 1,500 years ago? We have zero idea what these men sounded like. And they wrote it all in Latin, to boot. 

But this is why we have evolved this wonderful thing called IMAGINATION.

To my mind, the importance of hearing these ancient histories in different voices is paramount, to spread the knowledge that these primordial writers all had their own prejudices and reasons for leaving these writings to posterity – Roman or Catholic propaganda, essentially. So, using all my voice skills to perform these texts in distinct characterisation was the central challenge that spurred HISTORIES OF BRITAIN on to commercial availability. I hope to give the listener some degree of shivers when they hear writing which has rotted on the page for many many centuries, performed as aural entertainment, as once they naturally would have been.

Plus, it’s not as if any living person can truly claim any meaningful knowledge of how any of these ancient names are pronounced, because anybody who knew the people in question died over a millennium ago. That degree of licence was quite a comfort. Dislike how I pronounce Boudica? Go and complain to her.

HISTORIES OF BRITAIN goes further than just reading aloud, though, because besides editing and performing these seminal texts, I have also penned a lengthy (and hopefully at times rather funny) introduction discussing all this historical intrigue, and sharing all the info we can scrape together on each of the mysterious historians included, from Tacitus to Nennius and back. So, this is largely an editing job, but also qualifies as a new book from me as historian. With apologies to qualified historians out there, I am open about having no History qualifications, it was a very badly taught subject when I was at school, so my historical knowledge comes from a lifetime of passionate extra-curricular fascination, with pre-Roman Britain especially. That passion is one of the things which has powered the Tales of Britain campaign for nearly 20 years, and the obsessive sifting of truth and fiction is essential to one of my most dearly coveted future book projects. As an author, I am just sharing that passion with you.

I sincerely hope that others who have their own fascination with British history will get online and buy a copy (perhaps to perform their own version of Gildas’ insane religious drivelling?) or will be able to download and enjoy the audiobook, dodgy accents and all. It could be handy for revision for a History student who has had enough of reading set texts, or it can just be enjoyed as pure entertainment. Either way, I greatly hope HISTORIES OF BRITAIN has appeal both home and abroad, and I hope I can continue to make superior audiobooks which both entertain and inform listeners, and – let’s be honest – which also help me to put shoes on little Fred’s feet. 

Right now we’re hoping to hear back from David Henry Wilson about recording some of his seminal children’s books, and are also in cahoots with the PG Wodehouse estate about filling some ludicrous gaps in his audio range – let’s kick Libravox to the kerb and do this job properly!

Now, history lovers, choose your medium!
PAPERBACK
EBOOK
AUDIOBOOK