The title of this post will only make sense to those who reocgised it as a play on the title of a well-known and well-loved paperback book on history.

Perhaps it is just me, but the BBC's 1963 week seems a somewhat odd juxtaposition of the origins of Dr Who and the shooting of Kennedy, neither of which I recall as was eleven months old at the time of the latter, and, to be honest, neither of them particularly interests me. 

The story telling approach, drawing in minor characters and hearing their voices is certainly a post Modern, if not necessarily Post-Modern, phenomenon.  The idea that all history is, to some degree, 'faction', an elision of 'fact' and 'fiction', may not please some historians, but cannot be denied: whilst certain facts can be independently verified, the 'story' told cannot be other than biased, informed by the aims of the writer.  So I am quite intrigued by the dramatised tellings of these stories, but perhaps the more so by the choice of which stories to tell.  Of course drama does not purport to be history, but it semes a lot of people learn their history from drama (not a new phenomenon - lines from Shakespeare have passed into popular historical consciousness).

I do meet people who can tell me exactly what they were doing when the news about Kennedy broke, and others who can do so for the release of Nelson Mandela or the death of the Princess of Wales, but not so many, and not with such clear impact as perhaps was once the case.  Instead, I suspect we have out own significant moments, in the usually unrecorded stories of our own lives, and evolve our own mythology around them, as verifable facts and interpetted memory intertwine.