BBC’s Civilisations: Is the new series as good as the original?

From the statue that joins the #MeToo movement to sparkly trainers, Melanie McDonagh has a first look at the return of the BBC's Civilisations series
Hosts: David Olusoga, Mary Beard and Simon Schama
BBC
Melanie McDonagh8 March 2018

Civilisations starts tomorrow —note the plural. It’s the series which plays catch up, 50 years on, with the original Civilisation, in the singular, by Kenneth Clark, rightly regarded as one of the high points of BBC programming, and a civilising influence in itself — see for yourself on BBC iPlayer.

So, the question that dogs the series is whether the new version is as good as the original, and whether it’s been affected for the worse by the relativism of our generation about whether any civilisation is better than any other.

Actually, it’s not so much a repeat of the first series as filling in the gaps that Clark himself identified at the outset. Clark, you see, made his Civilisation about the culture of Western Europe: the opening credits to the new series start off with the C-word but gradually adds an S at the end: Civilisations.

This is about the civilisations of the world, starting with those first Spanish cave paintings which show the outline of a human hand on a wall and going on to embrace the Egyptians, the Aztecs, the Benin bronzes, Islamic calligraphy, modern photography: it’s an extraordinarily ambitious project. Reithian, you might say.

So, this is taking up where Clark left off. The world has changed immeasurably since, and so has the nature of the audience and the technology available to the programme makers. If David Attenborough (yes, he) commissioned Clark’s series to show off colour television, well, this one can show off digital broadcasting.

New series: Simon Schama in Yosemite 
BBC

But, for all that has changed, this new series is still grandly ambitious broadcasting, ranging freely over the course of human history. It isn’t a single grand narrative but a series of themes which allow the presenters to switch between and across cultures.

If the title is in the plural, so too are the presenters. Simon Schama has the lion’s share of the nine episodes, with Mary Beard doing two and David Olusoga another two.

Inevitably the series is more disjointed than the original: instead of discussing the development of European civilisation in a coherent, chronological progress we dart, in one Schama episode, from Chinese paintings of 1,000 years ago, to the Persian concept of the paradise garden, to German drawings of the Reformation to Dutch landscapes and conclude with photographs of Yosemite by Ansel Adams and the ecological movement.

This thematic approach enables presenters to make comparisons across cultures — and the problem of selection must have been formidable — but it can be a jerky ride from Persian carpets to the Palladian villa.

In one respect the series is fabulously at odds with current broadcasting culture. If the first thing that strikes us now about the original series is Clark’s wonky teeth, it’s heartening that two of our three presenters aren’t a triumph of appearance over content either (Olusoga, in crumpled linen and edgy specs, is rather attractive).

Schama has a kindly lived-in face and an unambiguous paunch. While Clark was serenely contained in his gestures, preferring to keep one hand in his pocket, Schama gesticulates and bobs his head around: he looks like an animated tortoise.

He is boundlessly enthusiastic: his face lights up at little fertility goddesses with enormous breasts and bottoms and he isn’t above showmanship, as when he shows how a medieval cathedral was once a riot of colour.

Beard also gives patrician poise a miss: she bounces about Mexico and Naxos with sparkly trainers (the camera comes to rest on them quite often), a tunic and floaty orange scarf and floaty hair: a bluestocking in black leggings. She gesticulates too, and grimaces.

But it’s Beard who has the most combative approach. Her home turf is the classical world and in her programme on beauty she takes issue with the received wisdom — well, it was once — that the summit of artistic beauty was arrived at with the Belvedere Apollo, which she contemplates, interestingly, in a copy at Syon House outside London, and the ancient Greek achievement of the ideal human form in sculpture.

In a nice bit of intellectual parricide she shows a clip of Clark himself discussing the statue, only to dismiss his judgment. That classical Greek ideal, she felt, has had a deadening effect on our perceptions of beauty ever since. She finishes in Mexico, suggesting that the prize possession of its archaeological museum might be a fake designed to show that Mexico too could do what the Greeks did.

History: Mary Beard and the Terracotta Army
BBC

Rather fabulously she gives us the first #MeToo moment for a statue, when she disapprovingly recounts the story of a young man who was so aroused by the first Greek statue of a naked women, he “left a mark of lust on her thigh”. It shows, she says, “how art can be used as an alibi for rape ...don’t forget, Aphrodite never consented.” Ahem.

Her other judgments are less controversial: that Egyptian art was merely monumental; that the Chinese terracotta warriors aren’t expressive.

Olusoga begins with the Benin bronzes of Nigeria, which he laments seeing in the British Museum rather than in Africa: they are, he makes clear, the result of colonial British despoliation.

He comes down hard and heavy on colonialism, especially the Spanish conquistadores, but is less exercised by the human sacrifices carried out by the Aztecs. His theme is contacts between cultures — trade, it seems, is the way to go. And he guns for the European notion that “their civilisation represented the pinnacle of human progress”. Not in his take.

Is Civilisations better than Civilisation? It’s different, it’s got modern sensibilities and different perspectives. But it lacks Clark’s authority: his judgments carried weight, though they were challenged in a later series by John Berger.

It also lacks the coherence of his single story of Western culture and, yep, cultural relativism is the name of the game. But it reminds us of humanity’s boundless creativity. Schama’s first programme begins with Islamic State smashing the artefacts of Nineveh: our Dark Ages barbarism. We may be no nearer defining what Civilisation is but we know what the alternative is.

Civilisations begins Thursday, February 28 at 9pm on BBC Two.

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