David Olusoga - A Gun Through Time

In the spirit of full disclosure I must admit - largely due to being a huge admirer of David Olusoga's television programmes - that I didn't pay much attention to the subject matter of his talk at the Theatre Royal. The clue, frankly, was staring me in the face, yet when confronted with an evening exploring A Gun through Time, the detail lying behind that title did give me a moment of doubt. As he swiftly established, our relationship with guns in the UK is at best tangential and usually confined to the farming, battle reenactment and target practice. If you're very interested in guns in this country then you're suspected, I think its fair to say, of being very odd. Olusoga confessed to being just that as a youngster, flashing up images of grim war comics that obsessed him as a lad. Throw into the mix, he argued, that we'd hardly come to see A Shed Through Time, and the rationale for the evening was established.

I'm not sure a history of the shed would have been any less interesting in Olusoga's hands, and in any case, the promise to talk us through the firearms that changed the world was really a hook to hang a much broader discussion on the impact of warfare. Before going into battle, as it were, Olusoga used an interactive gizmo to litmus test his audience - Norwich proved to be the most gun-wary audience of the tour - that investigated our perception of guns and the UKs ranking in terms of ownership and fatality. I'm not sure what the button pushing really added and it quickly petered out. Informative in its own right, this prologue felt bolted on to what was otherwise a history lecture - perhaps a remnant of an early version of the talk that no one had noticed didn't really fit anymore. What it did showcase, however, is how witty a speaker Olusoga is, quite a revelation given his austere TV persona. Given the grim journey he was about to take us on, perhaps its purpose was simply a chance to get to know each other.

The Brown Bess flintlock musket distinguished itself through its longevity. For a hundred and fifty years the standard issue for the British Army, embedding itself in the nation's psyche so firmly that events that are a flash in the pan can still go off half cocked. We got to see close up hallmarks and learned of its Tower of London origins, but this felt very much the overture to heart of the matter.

The Lee Enfield rifle that followed earned a place in the talk largely through its ubiquity and sophistication, rather than tales to be told. It gave Olusoga a shameless excuse to fire one on film during a Mad Minute, which he did with an ineptitude matched only - as he quipped - by his ability to spot a Traitor. So far, so light hearted, as the combination of time passed and damage limitation allowed him to talk with the enthusiasm of a collector rather than a chronicler of death.

With the introduction of the Thompson Sub-Machine Gun, however, the talk took a darker, and altogether more fascinating turn. John Thompson, like so many before and after him, managed to perform the mental gymnastics necessary to convince himself that the way to end war, particularly the Great War, was to offer up a more effective killing device. Unfortunately, for him, it was only perfected once peace was declared. His new customers during the Prohibition-era were the gangsters peddling booze, eventually followed by Churchill and the Allied forces. Olusoga's masterly handling of disparate facts and timelines - a skill employed so effectively in A House Through Time - came to the fore in what was the singularly most informative, fact packed section of his talk.

The elephant in the room, however - or at least the gun on stage - that we had skipped over was the Maxim gun. The reason, as became apparent after the interval, was that it warranted a grim segment all of its own. Hiram Maxim was a polymath, serial inventor, and the only man Olusoga could recall being character assassinated by his own autobiography. He turned his brilliant mind to creating a machine gun - and Olusoga reminded us it was a machine - as a money spinner. The British used it to devastating effect in Africa, yet failed to learn a self-taught lesson in World War One. In full flight, he railed against the arrogance and stupidity of the aristocracy, committed to cavalry charges in the face of the Devil's Paintbrush, spewing out 666 bullets a minute. Contrasting Kitchener, Haig and Churchill's involvement in the Sudan, where they witnessed what the Maxim Gun could do, with Lloyd George's impotent protestations that ordering two guns probably wasn't enough, the talk became a neat and elegant commentary on hubris, class and the futility of war.

And that's how this brilliant speaker would have left it only a few years back, but in a cruel twist Maxim guns, for so long locked away in museums and storage, are now back on the battlefield. In a sobering codicil, Olusoga shared photographs taken this year of those same guns taking down Russian drones in Ukraine. Their terrifying precision used, one surely has to concede, for good. It was the perfect metaphor to describe our complex, contrary relationship with weaponry by a man who must rate as one of the great educators of our times.