Schama – a man with the power to move mountains
I’m intrigued by the way Simon Schama pronounces “mountain”. Most of us put the stress on the first syllable (Mountain), but he places it on the second (mountain). As in, say, maintain or plantain. Usually, such idiosyncrasy would go unremarked. But being devoted to landscape art, there were so many mountains (and even a fountain) in last night’s enthralling third edition of Civilisations (BBC Two), you had to wonder whether he’d ever noticed it himself.
Not that Schama exhibits a scintilla of self-doubt. If one thing is clear from his presentation style, it’s that he has no problem with the didactic tone set by Kenneth Clarke in the original Civilisation 50 years ago. Schama tells us what he believes with all the passion of a prophet. Even if he’s making it up on the spot – as when he professed to be rendered almost mute before a painting by the 14th-century Chinese landscape master Wang Meng – everything he said emerged with the rhapsodic conviction of one who believes in the pre-eminence of his own opinion.
Which is no bad thing. I love Schama’s enthusiasm. It is about as far from hectoring as you can get. There were times last night when he seemed lit from within, so engaged was he with his subject. His face writhed with barely concealed delight – whether at the magnificence of what he was opining upon or his own flights of eloquence was often hard to discern. But his joy at being in the presence of some of humanity’s greatest artworks was palpable.
This was in contrast to Mary Beard’s edition on the human body last week, which questioned and challenged and insisted we take a position on things about which we’d normally never even have a view. Schama’s style is more that of the omniscient narrator. It might as well be God talking. (And you can’t help thinking Schama probably reckons he’s the next best thing.)
Much as I admire Beard, Schama’s style strikes me as better for a great blockbuster of a series like Civilisations. Sometimes you just want to sit back and soak up someone else’s erudition. I might not agree with everything Schama says (how he saw a crucified Christ in Altdorfer’s painting of a tree, I’ll never know). But I can’t help liking that he says it with the unshakeable confidence of a man who goes through life pronouncing mountain like he’d invented the word himself.
We continue to live in hope that science might one day provide a panacea for all our medical ills. What we fail to stop and think about are the new dilemmas such progress will present us with. Like the one probed in My Baby’s
Life: Who Decides? (Channel 4), a heartbreaking documentary exploring the question of when, if ever, a child who’s being kept alive mechanically should die.
There are few things as distressing as watching a sick infant suffer. For the parents and doctors we met at Southampton Children’s Hospital’s intensive care unit it was a daily occurrence. As one medic put it succinctly: “We can now keep people alive long beyond the point where we’ve got any real treatment for them.”
The three children featured were all dependent on life support machines. Tallulah (18 months) and Max (five months) had been born prematurely and could only breathe via a machine. Mimi (eight months) had heart failure and couldn’t be operated on as she was too little. As these babies battled painfully for life, and their parents struggled with shock and distress and the chance that their beloved baby might live but with no quality of life, the hospital’s medical ethics team debated their cases.
Aside from the clinical and ethical issues, questions of astronomical costs and unintended consequences (children with every chance of recovery being denied a place in intensive treatment units because of “blocked” beds) were also aired. We followed Mimi’s parents as they made the extraordinarily difficult choice to withdraw treatment because they couldn’t bear to see her suffer any more – a decision that was supported by the medics. Which seemed the right way round, as otherwise the problem is shifted on to the courts when parents disagree with clinical decisions to withdraw care.
In the end, we were left with was a gut-wrenching sense of the sadness of these cases, and deep unease at the thought that medical progress might only make them still complex and difficult to resolve in the future.
Civilisations ★★★★ My Baby’s Life: Who Decides? ★★★★