Cambridge academic Dr David Starkey has just signed a £2m deal to present a series of history programmes for Channel 4, making him better paid than Cilla Black or Anne Robinson. Steve Pratt looks at the attraction of the historian dubbed "the rudest man in Britain"

Forget Star Trek-like entreaties to boldly go where no one has gone before. In TV terms, the future is history. Channel 4's headline-grabbing signing of historian David Starkey is an indication that small screen producers are living in the past and viewers are happy to go back in time with them.

Until a few weeks ago, Cambridge University academic Dr David Starkey was an unlikely name to be featured in the same sentence as TV stars Cilla Black, Des Lynam, Anne Robinson and Chris Tarrant. He was familiar to BBC Radio 4 listeners from his argumentative appearances on the intellectual debate programme The Moral Maze, which led to him being dubbed "the rudest man in Britain".

Then Channel 4 executives realised they were on to a good thing after his historical series Elizabeth I and The Six Wives Of Henry VIII drew massive audiences. Starkey, the 57-year-old Kendal-born son of working class Quakers, shocked everyone by achieving better ratings than Ali G and long-running soap Brookside. Only the fly-on-the-wall Big Brother series proved a bigger ratings success for Channel 4.

No wonder they didn't waste any time signing him up. The phrase "golden handcuffs deal", usually the prerogative of TV stars like David Jason and Robson Green, was suddenly being bandied around in respect of Starkey.

His £2m four-year deal to present a series of documentaries about British kings and queens for Channel 4 gives him the highest hourly rate of pay on TV, way ahead of Blind Date match-maker Cilla Black and The Weakest Link's woman in black Anne Robinson.

Starkey reacted to the somewhat snobbish reaction to his good fortune with typical rudeness. "It shows you don't have to be dim to make money on TV. There is a market for programmes which are intelligent," he declared. "This deal represents a huge vote of confidence in history programming and gives me a wonderful opportunity to bring the stories of our past to a wider audience."

He'll present an 18-part series on the British monarchy, and seven hour-long history programmes on other as-yet-undecided subjects. Other channels are also keen to hitch a ride on the history bandwagon.

What they need to do is find another Starkey - a presenter who, despite a sometimes-abrasive manner, has the common touch. He's an academic who can make a potentially dull topic accessible to viewers more used to sound-bite documentaries like Postmen From Hell and The 100 Greatest Clips We Could Find In The Archive.

A Starkey history lesson is simply delivered. Shots of him wandering around talking about the subject are intercut with recreations of historical scenes using actors. This, his salary apart, makes history so much cheaper to present than commissioning expensive historical dramas at a time when TV companies are watching, and in many cases trimming, their costs.

Gone are the days when they could afford historical drama series such as The Six Wives Of Henry VIII with Keith Michell as the much-married monarch, Elizabeth R with Glenda Jackson as the virgin queen or Edward VII with Timothy West.

They were risky too. Not all met with success. The BBC's Churchill's People, a 26-part series based on Churchill's History Of The English-Speaking People, flopped in 1975.

The Starkey format is seemingly foolproof. The new documentary-style approach adds up to historical reality TV, although it doesn't go to the extremes of The 1940s House, Surviving The Iron Age or The Trench which make modernday volunteers experience the recreated conditions of a bygone time.

He's an informed, enthusiastic presenter of the facts who delivers an authoritative, sometimes controversial, history lesson that doesn't come across as stale, tired and irrelevant.

He believes passionately that there is an audience for history in a vivid narrative, unencumbered by the political correctness afflicting school lessons. Others point out that the increased interest in history coincided with the dawn of the new millennium when people's thoughts naturally turned to the past.

One advantage for programme-makers is that history comes complete with something every TV drama needs - good stories with enough double-dealing, sex, violence, family rows, religious intrigue, death, disease and murder to keep your average soap running for years and years. If anyone complains, you can justify it by referring them back to the history books and saying, "it's all true".

Another historian, Simon Schama, enjoyed success with his History Of Britain on BBC2. Series on Channel 4 have included Plague, Fire, War And Treason, and a current season on Napoleon. Even Channel 5 is screening less smut and more factual programmes, including The Most Evil Men In History and Gladiators Of World War Two.

Clearly other channels won't want to let Starkey corner the market. BBC1's just-announced spring and summer season, for instance, sees the debut of Arthur - King Of The Britons. The presenter is not an academic but an actor, Richard Harris. His qualifications amount to the fact that he once played King Arthur in the musical Camelot, not quite up to Starkey's academic standard. Harris's quest to discover the true story behind the legend will mix live action, computer technology and archaeology to recreate the era of Arthur.

Starkey's opinion of Harris the historian is unknown, but past evidence proves he shows no mercy when others he considers less qualified invade his territory. One young pretender was 27-year-old Tristram Hunt, a Cambridge academic who presented BBC2's recent series of The Civil War and was billed as the BBC's answer to the Channel 4 history man. Starkey's new-found fame caused him to comment: "It just goes to show that you don't have to be a twentysomething Adonis to present on TV."

Producers are finding other ways to go back in time. Series such as The Second World War In Colour, which uses little-seen footage from the period, have proved popular, although such output is restricted by the limited amount of material available. That's why they need capable front men to conjure up in words what happened centuries ago.

Channel 4 and BBC2 are increasing history production by as much as a third. BBC2 controller Jane Root says: "It's the absolute core of what we are doing." The History Channel has around 45m subscribers around the world.

Historical TV is earning a place of its own in TV history. As one delegate told the First World Congress of History Producers last year: "We're the new rock'n' roll and we're going to keep on rocking."