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Schama's father, a textile merchant, would take him to synagogue as a young boy and he was taught to read Hebrew at the age of five. He spent his first years in Essex, where his mother had been working during the war as an assistant to senior executives and test pilots at de Havilland, the aviation manufacturer.

When his father's bankruptcy moved the family back to London, life resumed for Schama in Golders Green. As a young teenager, he would hang out in nearby Willesden Green with Maurice and Charles Saatchi, the future advertising gurus, skipping school at lunchtime and frequenting the salt beef bar. "We were city boys – we thought we owned the city, really: winkle-picker shoes and drainpipe trousers and chatting up girls on a bus."

But the teenage Schama wasn't just partying. He was also trying to understand Marx and attending after-school classes for "Left-wing Zionists". Growing up in what he describes as the truncated world of the Forties and Fifties, he became hooked on history. "I felt very early on that, if you were lucky, you could keep company with people from hundreds of years ago."

Indeed, in his history of the Jews, Schama guided viewers through the millennia. What does it mean to him to be a Jew? "An awful lot. It means to be the inheritor of an immense and gifted, as well as burdened, history. It's about the richest and most extreme history you could possibly imagine. You also inherit an extraordinary bundle of ethical precepts in the Torah."

He attends synagogue "quite a lot" because it offers a community that he loves, but he seems uncertain about the existence of God. "I'm an agnostic in that way. I don't believe the universe caused itself." When pressed, he says, "I'm still investigating the possibility of a prime cause and I'm inclining towards the possibility that there indeed is one."

Not everyone appreciated The Story of the Jews. Anti-Zionist Jews, Schama says, have been really upset. He describes himself as a Zionist, but is not in favour of the settlements.

"I never have been. I've always been a two-state Zionist. I've always [been], and still am, militantly in favour of a Jewish state and a Palestinian state living side by side. I'm not a Zionist who sees it as any kind of Messianic duty to repopulate what's called Judaea and Samaria, and I'm certainly not a Zionist who is willing to turn away from acknowledging the scale of suffering that has befallen the Palestinians."

Rather, he is a champion of Israel as a Jewish democracy. "It's very important those [words] go together. Israel will not be Israel if it becomes a theocracy, but I'm really absolutely positive it won't because more than half the population are not predisposed to that. It won't be a Jewish democracy if it annexes the whole of the West Bank and treats the Palestinians as a colonised, voteless class. That can't happen."

After briefly working on a kibbutz, Schama went to Cambridge and emerged with a starred first in history. The university was, he says, more startlingly public school than he had anticipated. He did not face any anti-Semitism but had the occasional "ugly duckling moment". Really? "I sure was [an ugly duckling] actually. Quack, quack."

Today, he claims to resemble an oil painting – but with a twist. "While I was doing [a programme on] Rembrandt, somebody said, 'You should have called the book Rembrandt's nose, Simon, since yours is indistinguishable.'"

A decade at Cambridge teaching history and political thought was followed by a "proper" faculty job at Oxford. Schama never did a PhD and wrote his first book instead, but Harvard made him a professor and he moved to Boston with his partner, Ginny, an American geneticist. They married in 1983 and a decade later he switched to Columbia University in New York. "[Ginny] got this fantastic job and I was a kind of add-on at Columbia – very happy to be so."

The daughter of a cowboy, Ginny wanted space, so he had to resist the half of him that wanted "one of those great Columbia University Riverside Drive apartments". Instead, they settled north of the city, not far from the Hudson River. "It's maybe a little too quiet now the children have long since gone. I slightly crave the noise and din of the city." When he needs an urban fix, he flies to London, where he has a flat.

It was in the United States that Schama broke into television as a "talking head" in a BBC co-production. His performance championing a Velasquez work caught the eye of BBC executives and the 15-part series The History of Britain was one of the rewards.

Now on the threshold of his 50th film, he says that he was very "shouty" in his earlier days. He remembers standing on the edge of the Roman baths and yelling his head off. "The extremely sweet cameraman came back and said, 'Uh Simon, you've actually got a radio mic on, we can hear you perfectly well'."

These days, speaking to the camera comes more naturally and understanding the technical details of making television has helped him as a presenter, he says. He sits in on edits and involves himself in the minutiae of sound mixing and colour grading.

A seasoned film-maker and respected historian Schama may be, but learned taxi drivers are wont to point out a mistake he has "probably made on the Battle of Hastings". So has he ever watched a programme on air and realised there was something historically inaccurate about it – and felt powerless? "Yes, absolutely. Nothing really egregiously glaring but it can be a matter of emphasis, which is almost tantamount to a historical mistake actually. Which is not good."

Television has helped Schama with his writing. "Television is a wonderfully disciplined master and sometimes I do think that while you are much more liberated in writing, the danger in my case is of self-indulgence, of over-digression, of over-expansiveness."

He says that when he has completed a week's worth of writing, he goes over it "like a television editor", questioning "has it gone places it has no business going? How much can a reader stand?"

Does he have an ego? "I certainly don't think of my career as a display of ego but while you are there doing your turn around the stage the ego is obviously involved in a pathetically childlike, needy way."

Time spent with Schama is a mix of the cerebral and the fun, and sometimes both at once. When I ask him who he is, he laughs. "An elderly writer about the past, really." But the past, for him, is alive in the present, and he sets about both with an energy that is infectious.

Just beware the flailing arms if you meet him on the dance floor.