Katherine MacAlister catches Prof Michael Wood as he travels between China and Bloxham’s latest festival

Michael Wood’s six-part BBC series on China airs tonight. He is concurrently writing a book on Shakespeare for OUP, conducting academic research, professor of public history at Manchester University, a governor at the RSC, and a columnist for BBC history magazine, as well as being a husband and father.

So when Bloxham Festival of Faith and Literature wanted someone to talk about Shakespeare, they did what any intelligent organisation would do and asked a busy man.

“I am fire-fighting at the moment, lurching from crisis to crisis,” he laughs, “but it’s almost finished. I do a lot of work on the train….”

The 67 year-old hopes that once the China series is over he might be able to slow down a bit, but one senses that this is just how he likes it.

“China was a massive project, and it was scary because it was such a huge responsibility for a middle-aged, middle-class white man dealing with a foreign culture and covering 4,000 years in six programmes, But it has been enormously well received.

“So yes, it is a complex story, but this is my job, it’s what I do. I’m a film-maker and historian and tell the narrative in a structured form while being informative and entertaining.

“But how the Chinese deal with the last half of the last programme on Chairman Mao, the Cultural Revolution, famines and Tiananmen Square will be the most telling, because it doesn’t pull any punches, although I have tried to make it sympathetic at the same time.”

But then it is Michael Wood’s inherent fairness, academic approach to all subject matter, love of travelling and fascination with history that makes him the perfect presenter. And with 35 years of experience under his belt, and over 100 documentaries, there’s more to come.

“I started all this in the pre-Internet age when there were only four channels on TV so things have changed enormously and yet our thirst for knowledge remains unchanged.”

Struggling initially with his TV leanings on leaving Oxford, he misses academic life. “It wasn’t until the 1990s when I was in Iraq that I realised this was a career not an interlude, and that it was OK to have two hats on.”

Born in Manchester’s Moss Side, Prof Michael Wood refuses to be patronised about his upbringing. Despite being born during a “traumatic period in Moss Side’s history in a back-to-back house” he has nothing but praise for his council estate primary school and says “it changed my life”. He then got a scholarship to the local grammar school; “Manchester Grammar School was the best school in the country at the time,” he says indignantly.

At Oxford University, loved playing football and starring in any play that would have him, but didn't enjoy his course, saying it was “hopelessly behind the times”. “I don’t think any of my contemporaries enjoyed it either, and it certainly didn’t interest me. I wanted to get on,” he said. "But I loved Oxford, both my daughters went to uni  there, and we still love it." 

Taking a year off, he hitched around Greece and Turkey before joining ITV and then the BBC, making documentaries on the Anglo-Saxons. “The BBC’s mantra is to educate, inform and entertain, and I still believe in that. I am the intermediary between the experts and the viewers. Regardless of the historical context you have to make it interesting and entertaining.”

His topics have ranged from Alexander The Great “one of the most popular” (it went to 140 territories and the book to No 1”, to the Spanish Conquistadors “even bigger,” India, and the Trojan War But Shakespeare? That seems rather out of sequence. “Shakespeare was born in 1564 in the backdrop of the Reformation, five-and-a-half years after Elizabeth came to the throne. So I have always been interested from a historical point of view about how it shaped him.”

A Shakespeare autobiography and a recent documentary on Shakespeare’s mother Mary Arden means he will be on familiar territory at the Bloxham Festival tomorrow despite not being “a man of faith.”

“England had been a Catholic country for 1,000 years and then Henry VIII made it hard line Protestant, Mary hardline Catholic and Elizabeth back to Protestant, so England was going through some of the most tumultuous psycho dramas it was ever to experience,” he says, getting into his stride. “so in the context of Shakespeare and how it shaped him, it’s fascinating.

“You’ve got to do what interests you and like Dante or Odysseus there is always another journey to go on. The world is a wonderful place.”

Bloxham Festival of Faith and Literature – February 19-21.

0845 017 6965 or bloxhamfaithandliteraure.co.uk.