In Defence of Civilisation
Plans to remake the landmark BBC TV series raise challenging questions about contemporary pieties.
A vision in tweed: Kenneth Clark filming an episode of Civilisation in the Lake DistrictHow often has Lord Hall paused to regret announcing that the BBC intends to remake Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation? The notion becomes more fraught with difficulty at every turn. Set aside the question as to whether a modern Civilisation is a good idea and still Hall’s problems, or rather those of his commissioning editors, multiply.
First shown in 1969 in 12 episodes, Civilisation focused exclusively on western Europe. It is inconceivable that today’s BBC could make a series that excluded the cultures of the Far East, India, Africa and Central and South America. So is one that paid little attention to women. Or indeed one that started, as Clark’s did, with the disarming statement: ‘What is civilisation? I don’t know … but I think I can recognise it when I see it.’
Early attacks on Clark were instigated by his ideological opposite John Berger and they hit home. The way that Clark has been wilfully misinterpreted is, however, also a measure of changed times and contemporary pieties. His omission of other cultures was not because he thought them inferior but because, as he admitted, he didn’t know much about them. He did not ‘suppose that anyone could be so obtuse as to think I had forgotten about the great civilisations of the pre-Christian era and the east’, but people did. It is worth noting that he hardly mentioned Spain – Velázquez, Goya et al – in the series because he thought the country’s contribution to culture too slight: ‘One asks what Spain has done to enlarge the human mind and pull mankind a few steps up the hill.’ It is also forgotten that the series had the all-important subtitle; ‘A personal view by Kenneth Clark’.
Hall’s greatest problem though is who should play the Clark role. Immediately after the BBC announcement, the retiring novelist Kathy Lette unhelpfully whipped up a petition signed by the likes of Helena Kennedy, Shami Chakrabarti, Tracy Chevalier and Sandi Toksvig instructing Hall not to plump for a man. Mary Beard is their poster girl, though what attributes she would bring to a discussion of 19th-century Paris or pre-Columbian Peru was not made clear. Among other widely tipped names Neil MacGregor and Simon Schama stand out. Pick a woman and Hall will be accused of pandering to feminists, pick MacGregor and he will be demonstrating patrician tendencies; pick Schama and it will show a lack of imagination. And why no black or Indian presenter?
Clark may have been derided for his tweediness and his plummy tones but he had a breadth of expertise that is unrivalled today. By 28 he was Keeper of the Department of Fine Art at the Ashmolean and, three years later, Director of the National Gallery and Surveyor of the King’s Pictures. Civilisation was far from his only foray into television; he presented more than 50 programmes, including a series on Japanese art.
Indeed it was the gift of a set of Japanese prints from his father, heir to a textile fortune and supposedly the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo, that first fired Clark’s interest in art. His tastes were far from Eurocentric. His grand generalisations (‘One fancies that Nordic man took a long time to emerge from the primeval forest’ or ‘I suppose it’s debatable how far Elizabethan England can be called civilised’) may now seem laughably de haut en bas but they were born from a lifetime of study: Clark was 66 when he made Civilisation. If you are going to make grand statements then it is best to be able to back them up and Kenneth Clark could.
Although his books are no longer required reading, they were groundbreaking in condensing vast genres for the first time. Like those of his hero Ruskin, they were readable in a way that subsequent art history often is not.
In one sense, though, Hall’s initiative seems apposite. Civilisation was first aired while both the Cold War and the Vietnam wars were in full swing and only a year after the événements in Paris and the assassination of Martin Luther King. So, when Clark said of the fall of the Roman Empire that ‘It does seem hard to believe that western civilisation could ever vanish and yet, you know, it has happened once’, his words had a contemporary relevance. And when David Attenborough, then controller of BBC2, asked him to create the series he had ‘no clear idea’ of what civilisation meant except that: ‘I thought it was preferable to barbarism, and fancied that now was the moment to say so.’ Different times perhaps but it is worth saying it again.
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