It is raining, naturally. The heavens are appropriately dark. The camera focuses tight on to the suitably grim face of our presenter who in a jerkily cut monologue declares:

"There are some places where history just grabs you by the jugular. This is one of them. A terrible place. Gettysburg. It is just awful silence here. It's so quiet you can hear the remorseless thunder of the guns. A landscape of hell. Twenty-seven thousand wounded. Eight thousand bodies. American against American. Absolute dead-on, horrifying slaughter. Insanely deluded ideas of chivalry. Confederate infantrymen and horses charging gun emplacements. Up there! [He points] Up there! [He points again in case we missed it]. Carnage. Limbs off. People screaming. Ridiculous military bands fifing and drumming their way in and out of the bloodshed. It's farmland. It's farmland! The heart of America. You walk along here, squishing the mud and you feel the bones are gonna pop up. Even the boulders feel like burial mounds."

War may be hell, but it has rarely been as hellish as this.

There are multiple ironies in American Future, although I doubt media executives realise them. They hired Simon Schama, not only because he is a natural broadcaster but because of his reputation as a historian. This is based in no small measure on Citizens, his history of the French Revolution, in which he coolly dissects how the ham theatricality and oratorical excess of the revolutionaries led France to disaster. Each man kills the thing he loves, and when the BBC puts Schama on air it tells him to engage in the clichéd emotions and pathetic fallacies he earned his fame by denouncing.