Civilisations showed us why it was worth reviving
Simon Schama’s final edition of Civilisations (BBC Two) went out with a bang. Notably when it came to the work of Chinese artist Cai Guo-qiang, who creates art through the incendiary interaction of gunpowder and paint pigment. The ethereal images that Cai made specially for the film were a series high point. As was Cai’s seeming artistic humility. His process (“This is God’s work, his space and his dimension for creation… it cannot be replicated”) was refreshingly devoid of ego in a contemporary arts climate that often seems to celebrate the artistic personality as much as the work itself.
Whether art is simply a Sunday afternoon distraction nowadays or retains its capacity to serve a higher purpose was the principal focus of this film, in which Schama questioned the modernist dictum that anything can be art so long as it is presented as art. In a world where art regularly takes on the character of the disposable, can it still represent that “vital spark” of humanity?
Schama’s answer, unsurprisingly, was a resounding yes. Many will have felt that he made his case conclusively at the very outset of the programme when he visited the former Theresienstadt concentration camp in the Czech Republic. There he celebrated an exhibition of 4,500 drawings made by Jewish children incarcerated in the camp – both as a momentary escape from horror, for them, and as proof that the memory of their lives “remains inextinguishable” despite the Nazis’ ambitions. It was a good argument and a moving piece of television.
There seemed less point to his subsequent digression into the intellectual abstractions of Mondrian and Jackson Pollock. But things picked up again when he came to the more political work of contemporary practitioners Anselm Kiefer, Michal Rovner, Kara Walker and Ai Weiwei, who epitomised Schama’s idea of art as a “resistance to complacency”.
With one episode left (the last programme in the series goes out on Saturday), it is perfectly obvious why Civilisations could never have had the same educative, homogenising effect as the series that inspired it – Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation. The world, and the place of art in it, has simply moved on. That said, as nine discrete lectures, delivered by three of our most captivating cultural commentators, interrogating how we view art and what it means to us today, this has been a fascinating project that was undoubtedly worth the effort.
It’s 20 years since Britain’s most prolific serial killer was unmasked. Harold Shipman: Doctor Death (ITV) recalled the shabby circumstances in which his crimes came to light – Shipman’s incompetent forgery of an elderly victim’s will, discovered by her solicitor daughter. And the shock experienced by investigators and the local community in Hyde as, in the weeks that followed, the list of victims grew from one into dozens and then, potentially, hundreds.
Shipman killed on an unprecedented scale. Following his conviction on 15 counts for murder, a public inquiry identified more than 200 victims, with the true number possibly higher than 250. Yet as crime documentaries go, this one never really got to grips with the fallout from his murders. We met some of the police team who uncovered them, and who still clearly bore the emotional scars of the experience. We met a journalist who, when reporting on Shipman’s arrest for forgery, was told by one local: “You mean Dr Death? He’s a good doctor but you don’t last long.”
More intriguingly we heard from a policeman who arrested Shipman for drug offences in the Seventies, and his horror at the GMC’S failure to strike Shipman off at the time. Which, with the benefit of hindsight, would have saved many lives. Oddly, whether Shipman was prosecuted, and if not why not, went unmentioned.
Nor was any reference made to the fact that, long before Shipman’s arrest, concerns had been raised in Hyde by locals, including the coroner, about the high death rate among his patients. Something the police, who failed to investigate those concerns adequately, were criticised for during the inquiry.
In the end, though, the biggest hole in this documentary was any insight into why Shipman committed his crimes. He took his motives to the grave when he hanged himself in 2004, but there must be theories at least. Two decades on it seems inadequate to simply pick over these terrible crimes without giving any indication of what might have been behind them and what has been done to prevent such a thing occurring again.
Civilisations
Harold Shipman: Doctor Death