Dan Snow argues "it would be a complete catastrophe for all of us if the BBC didn't exist"

Our telly is in our living room. It’s very clever because it looks like a mirror when it’s turned off, so it doesn’t dominate the room.

What have you been watching on your mirror-like TV recently?

The whole family like sports – the women’s Euros were very exciting. I also like to show my three children old movies that I loved – Indiana Jones, Back to the Future – to see if they can tolerate them. They enjoy them.

Who controls the remote at home?

My wife [criminologist and philanthropist Lady Edwina Louise Grosvenor] does – I can’t really work the telly. You’ve got to navigate various portals and I’m not interested in this multiverse, whether a show is on Sky, or Netflix. It’s part of the reason I think TV is in trouble – it can take up to five clicks to reach the thing you want to watch.

Making TV yourself, you’ve moved away from traditional broadcasters?

I could see the way the wind was blowing, and I wanted to get into digital programming and publishing, which is why I started History Hit [a digital history platform]. But I still do TV, so I’ve got a foot in both camps.

Are you optimistic that the five main terrestrial channels can survive over the next 20 years?

You’d be mad to put a bet on it, given the changes in the last 20 years. On History Hit, the Fast channel [free, ad-supported streaming television] is very popular. It’s scheduled telly so, strangely, we appear to be reinventing TV channels, just in a different way. Traditional channels may continue to exist in some form.

Would you go to the barricades in order to save the BBC?

Yes, I absolutely would. It would be a complete catastrophe for all of us if the BBC didn’t exist. Public service broadcasting is very special indeed. It’s so important that we get our news from an impartial, responsible source. It’s what makes Britain great.

How important was your father, former Newsnight presenter Peter Snow, in getting you into TV?

I owe my mum and dad everything. I’m here because of the privilege. Without my dad’s love of history and reading, and taking me to historical sites, I wouldn’t have done history for my A-Levels or university. And then the BBC invited us to do programmes together [Battlefield Britain]. What inspired me was his ability to take complicated ideas and distil them for people without being condescending.

Was it difficult to find a fresh approach to showing what life was like in Pompeii for your series Pompeii: Life in the City?

Things open up all the time. We’re doing more and more excavation, which is light years ahead of what it was even 25 years ago. Archaeologists are now able to learn so much from organic material, from the food stuff that they’re discovering, and are able to excavate very carefully carbonised grass.

Director Ridley Scott told historical fact checkers to “get a life” about historical inaccuracies in his film Napoleon. Do facts matter?

No, that’s the great irony of this whole thing. I actually did a funny interview with Ridley about them. These are historical dramas, and they’re made up. As it happens, I think some of the best historical movies are those that have paid attention to accuracy, like Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World and The Last of the Mohicans, but if film-makers choose not to do that, it’s their right.

It’s the job of historians and geeks like me to have a laugh with it, and piggyback off some of the publicity and say: “That’s the wrong emperor, or the wrong cloak!”

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