A BBC blockbuster: has civilisation taken a turn for the worse?

The key to understanding the BBC’S new series on the high points of human culture lies in the last letter of its title, said Carol Midgley in The Times. Civilisations is a “remake” of Civilisation, Kenneth Clark’s seminal 1969 documentary series on European art. But the additional “s” proclaims the change of focus – it’s BBC code for: “We’re taking this global.” Where Clark took 13 episodes to do the West in detail, Civilisations does the whole world in nine. Where Civilisation had just one lordly presenter, Civilisations has a more democratic three: the historians Simon Schama and David Olusoga and the classicist Mary Beard. And where Clark kicked off his series standing stiffly in front of Notre-dame, this begins with an agitated Schama in the Middle East inveighing against the cultural vandalism of Islamic State. “We are the art-making animal,” he booms, “and this is what we have made.”

It’s Schama at his finest, said Euan Ferguson in The Observer. He takes us seamlessly from “Picasso back to bison cave paintings and Mayan catastrophes” – a triumphant way to start this big, ambitious series, with its constant reminder that “whitey didn’t, after all, invent all of art and culture”. Of course not, said Ed West in The Spectator: but I still take issue with its premise that all cultures “are somehow equal”. Call me a “stick in the mud”, but I don’t accept that The Wrestler, an Olmec sculpture that Beard presents as a fine example of Meso-american art, “is on a par with its Greek counterparts”. The trouble with this series is not its cultural relativism, said the BBC’S arts editor, Will Gompertz, on BBC News online; it’s that it has no idea where it’s going. Clark may have been dogmatic, but his programme had a bracing coherence and argument. Civilisations, by contrast, “is more confused and confusing than a drunk driver negotiating Spaghetti Junction in the rush hour”. Even Schama’s infectious energy can’t conceal “the absence of an intellectual argument with a discernible through line”. Beard is especially disappointing. She serves up a “tepid dish of the blindingly obvious and the downright silly” – never more so than when she tells the tale of a youth who, thousands of years ago, supposedly ejaculated on a nude sculpture of Aphrodite. This she theatrically describes as “rape”, adding: “Don’t forget, Aphrodite never consented.”

The series is a disaster, said Camilla Long in The Sunday Times. Each episode rushes from one culture to the next, presenting us with footage of mountains and crashing oceans and a roster of “florid descriptions”. This is not “an arts documentary, it’s a Mastercard ad”. There’s no denying its “frantic restlessness” gets wearying, said Rachel Cooke in the New Statesman. But equally, there’s no denying the sincerity and enthusiasm of its writer-presenters. Schama in particular has a wonderful ability “to concertina time, contracting and expanding it at will, the centuries falling away like dominoes”. Yes, the scope is so wide it leaves one with no real understanding of what fits where. “But what it lacks in chronology, it makes up for in feeling, and perhaps this is all that matters in the end.”