In Conversation with Stella Moss

'All I want is a good time. All the rest is propaganda.' Still from Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960): the film's anti-hero, Arthur Seaton, works hard with the sole aim of funding his social life.

What with Issue 18's theme being popular culture, we thought there would be no one better to talk with about how history and pop culture interact than Royal Holloway's very own Dr. Stella Moss. The next time you settle down to watch your favourite period drama, I can only recommend you keep these pertinent thoughts in mind!

Ruby: Do you think that history belongs at the movies?

A: Oh, for sure. Definitely. I think historical film, well, historically minded films with a 'historical' plot have been part of cinema since its arrival, just like they were with fiction. That perennial feel, the popular appeal history has, translates really well into the cinema screen. I'm less interested with, and this may be a controversial view, less concerned with historical accuracy than I am with what the film tells you about the time it was produced. There's so much to learn - you can go down a rabbit hole about 'whether it's the same ', or whatever, but of course it's not the same, it wasn't made in that time period! Of course, there can be absolute clangers when it's Ancient Rome and they have digital watches on; but the ability of the big screen, and the small screen actually, to bring history alive to both people who are well versed, like yourselves, undergraduates, people who have knowledge, and also to those who are new to it. Whether that's children, or whether that's a viewer dipping their toe in!

Ruby: Can popular culture be used to gain further understanding of actual people who are often dehumanised in breadth studies of history?

A: Sure, you can get drawn in with that narrative pull, the depiction of people and events. I think really, popular culture goes hand in hand with - well, it emerged as part of that whole 'history from below' movement in the 1960s and 70s - a way of broadening out understandings of 'capital H' history. Thinking about these things is a really useful way to humanise stories. One of the problems can be, depending on the period or circumstances, we don't necessarily have the sources. That can lead to really interesting questions about creativity, and how much levy do you have to 'imagine in' and fill in the spaces. There's some interesting things, historiographically in my field of modern Britain, scholars are thinking about this question: not so much filling in the blanks, but more speculation than the 19th century style classification. if you go in with yours eyes wide open, then yes I think it can be used in that way.

Ruby: It's common to think of pop culture as Hollywood celebrities and pop stars; outside of the 20th-21st centuries, what do you consider to be pop culture? E.g., was Lord Byron the Timothee Chalamet of his day?

A: There's some really interesting things there, in relation to the term 'popular history'. I never refer to 'pop history', or if I do its in the specific vein of music! I think it can narrow things down, when I use the term popular, I just mean 'mass', and the links between mass culture, broader sub-culture and everyday life. That's the kind of thing I'm really interested in.

I think sometimes one of the drawbacks of working with the idea of 'pop' history is that it can round off the edges in a not very helpful way. If you define it as just Hollywood, the reception to that is going to be very different in different places. It's obviously also a set of ideas that is privileged, in terms of access, can you get to the cinema?: yes, probably in this country, maybe not always, but certainly that's not the case globally. So implicitly, it's got a certain perspective to it, and I think it's also the case that in the terms of cultural criticism, people have tended to use the word 'pop' in quite a pejorative sense. Like 'pop' psychology or 'pop' sociology, something not just ephemeral and throw away, but of less importance. And for that is just not the case.

If you take Covid, for example, you can definitely look at the national regulatory frameworks and what was happening in medical advances, and international connections in how supply chains were working, all of that stuff. But one of the really interesting things is 'what were we all doing?', and what does that tell us about ourselves and our experiences? Whether that was school and work from home, and that coping mechanism of leisure and recreation, popular culture as I would see it, had an enormously significant role to play for all that. For me, that's becoming a useful example to help explain to people why I think the history of everyday life is important. Not to say that the other stuff isn't important, you absolutely need to know what the great and the good were up to, but your history is as important as anybody's.

Ruby: In the modern day, we've divided culture from what is 'popular' and what is 'cultured'. Has this distinction always existed?

A: I think it's always been there. There's always going to be things that appeal to elite tastes, like the ballet, opera, cultural forms that have been predicated on prestige and money and affluence. And with that, quite rightly, there's been lots of interventions to broaden them out. But in broad terms, they are associated in the popular imagination with a high quote-unquote culture. Again, that idea that 'low culture' is 'low' is so reductive, there's so much there that can tell us about any society, so for a historian it's fascinating.

I don't think it's a really neat divide ; it's almost a cliché that Shakespeare wrote for the groundlings too; that idea of labelling something as 'great art' can encompass a lot of different strands of things. Thinking in those terms isn't that helpful. Certainly I'm not going to defend keeping one pot of culture over here and one over there! But especially now, given the internet and the way it can be used, gives a greater access to things in different ways.

Those old divides don't stand up in ways that they maybe once did. But yes I do think there's always been a sense of a spectrum with high and low culture. You can always critique that; you can always see spaces that are more complex than that easy binary divide might suggest.

Ruby: Is popular culture a valid way of increasing accessibility to history as a subject?

A: Definitely. It's really interesting, when we talk to first years and they come in as freshers and ask what got them into history, the number one thing is always Horrible Histories. Just look at the power of that to capture all of these children's imaginations.

Yes completely, I think the things that spark imagination and that equip people to think about the ideas exist in popular culture. To go back to our earlier point about historical accuracy, people get very hung up, very upset about it. If you take something like Peaky Blinders, that initially ran quite close to the historical record in terms of what we know about gangs, and then completely departed! So for me, it's just 'eyes wide open', because it's about drawing people in and expanding our understanding of different things.

Ruby: Do you have any recommendations for Historia readers to engage with history via popular culture?

A: Too many to choose! Obviously, I'm a historian of Modern Britain, so I think it's really great that some things are more accessible than they used to be. So things like Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister are really great insights into that period.

Something a bit later actually, and less well known is a fantastic series called Our Friends in the North. There's a lot of big-name actors, where it was there first gig. So, Daniel Craig is in it and Christopher Eccleston, and Gina McKee. It's just a really interesting historical look at the development of modern society. I'd definitely recommend that.

I think it's quite interesting that you can take a look at different adaptations of something. So, Boys from the Blackstuff, was a play and then a TV show, and then has recently been on stage again, so there's different interpretations of that. You might think 'what on earth does early 80s Liverpool have to do with anything?', but there's actually a lot in there about the cost of living crisis and resonance.

But oh, there's so many! Loads of great films as a way in, I always put long lists of recommendations for the modules I run, so I'm sure you can find something!

Interviewed by Ruby Day (24-25 Assistant Editor), 2nd Year History

Layout by Charlotte Reid (24-25 Editor-in-Chief), 2nd Year History

Issue 18, Popular Culture, March 2025

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Stella Moss is a historian of modern Britain, specialising in popular culture and gender. Her main research to date centres on the history of popular culture and consumption in modern Britain, and in particular, on the history of drinking cultures in the twentieth century.