Dan Snow has revealed the unusual thing he tells his three children when they ask him a difficult question about the future.
Dan admits he hides some unpleasant realities from his kids(Image: Darren Gerrish, Darren Gerrish/WireImage for 5/Paramountvia Getty Images)
Historian and documentary-maker Dan Snow has highlighted the challenges faced by many parents as he revealed the difficulties of raising children in a deeply troubled world. In a new interview, he has revealed how he does his utmost to protect his children from the “grotesque” reality of threats such as climate change and nuclear war.
Dan, whose parents were both television journalists and who has countless family ties to the intertwined worlds of news and politics, has confessed that he routinely “lies” to his three children about what lies ahead.
“The biggest, most depressing lie I’ve told my children,” he tells The Times, “is that the world is well-run and the risk of nuclear war and climate change is being dealt with by experts.”
Yet in reality, the celebrated TV historian says, we are all “on a highway to catastrophic civilisational collapse,” while he does his best to reassure his son and two daughters that the adults have everything firmly in hand.
He admits: “The kids look at me and go, ‘Is everything OK? This is all fine, right?’ and I say, ‘Yes.'”
As Christopher Nolan’s epic retelling of Homer’s Odyssey hits cinemas, Dan is retracing the journey of Odysseus’s return from the siege of Troy in a two-part documentary series streaming on his History Hit platform this month before airing on Channel 5 this Thursday, July 16.
While his journalist parents were always fixated on the latest breaking news, Dan says he was far more drawn to “the substructural factors, the longer history behind those moments.”
This passion led him to produce a string of acclaimed historical documentaries, spanning everything from the Battle of El Alamein to China’s Terracotta Army. His family’s most significant historical legacy is, without doubt, his great-great-grandfather David Lloyd George, the only Welshman ever to serve as Prime Minister.
Lloyd George is renowned both for steering the nation through the First World War and for a private life that was dogged by scandal.
Dan reveals he became captivated by his celebrated relative’s story: “I found it inspiring that he was raised by his uncle, a cobbler, and got into grammar school; then university, then politics. He was the first and only Welsh-speaking prime minister, the first from a working-class background,” he says.
Yet there’s no profound emotional bond, he adds: “He was a serial philanderer and ultimately disappeared off down to Surrey with his second wife, so my side of the family are the ones who got left behind.”
Dan has, naturally, produced a documentary film in which he delves into the turbulent, ambition-fuelled life of his great-great-grandfather.
It charts how the PM built his reputation as a groundbreaking social reformer and the “man who won the war”.
He argues that Lloyd George was “the first man in history to become Prime Minister of the United Kingdom without money, without connections, without royal blood in his veins or whatever else. He was the first of a new kind of politician.
“What’s weird,” Dan adds, “is that it didn’t happen after Britain’s period of imperial rule and dominance. It happened right in the middle of it.
“At the absolute moment of greatest influence and power over the world, you had a man in charge of Britain who had risen from a humble background.”