The week in radio Iona Mclaren Ernst Gombrich deserves more than a potted history
The BBC’S reboot of Civilisations earlier this year sent people back to Kenneth Clark’s 1969 television series for a tussle over its moral flaws. Two decades before Clark, someone else sat down with their postcards to arrange Western art into an ambitious story. That was Ernst Gombrich, the man Clark set out to eclipse as the nation’s favourite art historian. Like a real eclipse, it didn’t last. Gombrich’s 1950 The Story of Art has sold more copies than any other art book, and it has worn better than Clark’s grand story, even though it is, in theory, more antique.
Archive on 4: The Story of EH Gombrich (Radio 4, Saturday) was presented by his granddaughter and literary executor, Leonie Gombrich, but it shared almost none of the virtues of his book – it was ineptly ordered and complacent in assuming we already cared about its subject. Anyone coming to Ernst Gombrich cold would have found revelations about what his writing was like buried near the end – a decent way to structure a murder mystery, less so a profile of a Viennese intellectual.
There were other mysteries, too. A softly-spoken Scot, who was almost certainly former British Museum director Neil Macgregor but never named, as if his voice, like the Queen’s, now needs no introduction, told us that Gombrich’s “spoken English was heavily accented, but his written English was of crystalline purity, which now and then matches
Jane Austen”.
We eventually heard a bit of that prose, the opening of The Story of Art, which is where this programme should have begun, too: “There really is no such thing as Art. There are only artists. Once there were men who took coloured earth and roughed out the forms of a bison on the wall of a cave; today they buy their paints, and design posters for the Underground; they did many things in between. There is no harm in calling all these activities art as long as we keep in mind that such a word may mean very different things in different times and places, and as long as we realise that Art with a capital A has no existence.” For Art with a capital A, as Gombrich goes on to say, has come to be something a bogey and a fetish. Can you imagine Kenneth Clark having written that?
Leonie Gombrich did give us treats from the archive: a few clips from the 14 hours of cassettes her brother had recorded of their grandfather (why wasn’t this the substance of the programme?); a wartime chit vouching for Gombrich’s loyalty to Britain, signed, amusingly, by Anthony Blunt; a postcard from Gombrich’s best friend Karl Popper, compressing their beliefs about cognition and perception: “Gerald Durrell’s zoo is a great achievement, but the apes are without doubt suffering very severely from boredom – no problems to solve. The setting of the zoo is beautiful but this they cannot appreciate. Much love, Karl.”
But the best bits were from Gombrich’s Desert Island Discs in 1992, in which his humility and good humour came across like a warm tickling on the ear. “Everyone is as clever as they are, minus how clever they think they are,” he told Sue Lawley, “and that leaves a lot of people with a negative score.” Not him.
Jules Verne was very clever to visualise the submariner lifestyle back in 1870, and now Leagues Under the Sea (Radio 4, Sunday) feels futuristic all over again, as Captain Nemo’s Nautilus, sustainably zipping around powered by salt water, is something out of Elon Musk’s wilder dreams. This dramatisation added more modernity in the form of Connie, the daughter of Verne’s protagonist Arronax, who injected a lady’s voice into the milieu, and realised the surly harpoonist Ned Land’s potential as a love interest.
In fact, very little romance was had, which was puzzling as Connie (Madeline Hatt) and Ned (David Seddon) were captive on Nautilus for months. Love Island, I’m told, gets it done in days. But the sound-effects people clearly had a whale with their watery repertoire – great groans, bubbles and rollers – all of which was preferable to hearing some grisly, close-miked kiss.
Sounds to make you jump were the order of the day on The Compass: Living with Nature (World Service, Wednesday), the first in a series in which recordist Chris Watson paints portraits of wildlife in different places. This one, from the plains of the Masai Mara, gave us pelting rain, the dawn chorus changing tune as the sun emerged, elephants making a call so deep that it can only be felt, not heard.
These transporting sounds made you realise how little we actually listen when that Attenborough footage is in front of us; we’re too busy looking. A lion on the screen is a thing of wonder. An unseen lion grunting in your ear is a more alarming proposition.
Jemima Lewis is away