Michael Wood (historian)

Michael Wood
At the University of York, circa 2011
Born	Michael David Wood (1948-07-23) 23 July 1948 (age 68) Manchester, Lancashire, United Kingdom
Occupation	Historian, broadcaster, documentary filmmaker
Known for	In Search of the Dark Ages (1979) Great Railway Journeys (1980) In Search of the Trojan War (1985) In the Footsteps of Alexander the Great (1998) The Story of India (2007) The Story of England (2010) The Story of China (2016)

Michael David Wood (born 23 July 1948) is an English historian and broadcaster. He has presented numerous well-known television documentary series from the early 1980s until present. Wood has also written a number of books on English history, including In Search of the Dark Ages, The Domesday Quest, The Story of England and In Search of Shakespeare. He was appointed Professor of Public History at the University of Manchester in 2013.

Wood was born in Moss Side, Manchester, Lancashire. He attended Heald Place Primary School in Rusholme, Manchester. When he was eight, his family moved to Wythenshawe where he went to Benchill Primary School. At Manchester Grammar School, he developed an interest in theatre, playing Grusha in the first British amateur production of Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle. He took A-levels in English, French and history.

Wood studied history and English at Oriel College, Oxford, touring the United States for six weeks in his final year, and graduated with a second class Bachelor of Arts degree. Later, he undertook post-graduate research in Anglo-Saxon history at Oriel. Three years into his research for a DPhil, he left to become a journalist with ITV.

In the 1970s Wood worked for the BBC in Manchester. He was first a reporter and then an assistant producer on current affairs programmes, before returning to his love of history with his 1979–81 series In Search of the Dark Ages for BBC2. He quickly became popular with female viewers for his blond good looks (he was humorously dubbed "the thinking woman's crumpet" by British newspapers), his deep voice, and his habit of wearing tight jeans and a sheepskin jacket. Wood's work is also well known in the United States, where it receives much airplay on PBS and on various cable television networks. The series Legacy (1992) is one of his more frequently broadcast documentaries on US television.