Last night on television Ed Cumming Mary Beard shows it is right to keep faith in Civilisations
In preparation for the BBC Two’s I watched Kenneth Clark’s original, Civilisation, all 13 hours of which are currently available on iplayer. If that sounds unimpressive to older readers they overestimate the millennial attention span. Perhaps it was gripping to watch Kenneth Clark trundle around in tweed when the entertainment competition was On the Buses. With Netflix, a Playstation 4 and an iphone to hand, it’s like waiting for a giant tortoise to cross the road when you’re late for a plane.
The producers of the new series are clearly aware of this. Between presenters Simon Schama, Mary Beard and David Olusoga, they have achieved as much charisma and razzmatazz as possible while retaining intellectual credibility. Last night’s episode, The Eye of God, presented the relationship between religion and art like an action film. To explain how different faiths have balanced the tension between divinity and its depiction, Beard went from Angkor Wat, in Cambodia, to the Acropolis, via the Blue Mosque, Ely Cathedral, Venice and the caves of Ajanta, India.
Just as the presenter hopped continents, so the camera flitted frantically from shot to shot: ornate tiles; damaged statues; stained glass; sunset panoramas; bizarre lingerings on the presenter’s silver trainers, all accompanied by tense music. Beard would occasionally deliver monologues lounging on a step, presumably to look like she’s a chilled-out entertainer.
What’s good for the air miles is not necessarily good for the argument. With so many different scenes to set, there was barely time for Beard to build her case before she was rushing off to the next site. An academic will not relish having to explain that “Islam is absolutely not an artless religion”, for instance. It was only right at the end, at the Acropolis, that the programme truly took wing, when Beard argued that our modern belief in civilisation is itself a kind of faith. Like all the best documentaries, it left us with as many questions as it answered.
In many ways, Civilisations is terrific: expansive in scope and ready to grasp its subject. Any comparison with its tweed-clad forebear is also a measure of the audience’s changing appetites. Able to assume his viewers’ familiarity with his subjects, Clark was free to cast new light on them. The presumption in Civilisations was that we are being introduced to most of the material for the first time. It’s wider, but less deep; a fair reflection, perhaps, of the cultural landscape in which it sits.
Martin Luther King by Trevor Mcdonald (ITV) could easily have been a paint-by-numbers look at an overfamiliar figure. To mark the 50th anniversary of King’s assassination, the former newsreader travelled through the American South in the civil rights leader’s footsteps. But while there was nothing especially revelatory, this documentary was elevated by the quality of the interviewees and Mcdonald’s evident love of his subject. How many other presenters could recruit John Lewis, the US Representative for Georgia who marched alongside King, the former Secretary of State Colin Powell, and supermodel Naomi Campbell?
Martin Luther King is remembered for his words, and four words in particular, but Mcdonald, fittingly for a former newsreader, reminded us that the civil rights movement was mainly about images. Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat on the bus. Hundreds of thousands gathered at the Washington monument. Police using water cannon and dogs to disperse black men, women and children who had peacefully gathered. Television showed America itself, and America didn’t like what it saw.
It feels like ancient history, particularly as the “I have a dream” speech must be one of the last mass public events recorded almost entirely in black and white. But as Mcdonald showed us, it’s still recent history. While some of the heroes of the time are still alive, so, too, are some of the Ku Klux Klan members who opposed them. The former KKK member who agreed to be interviewed is a reformed character, but in MLK’S time, he and other right-wing extremists were happy to stand back and watch as the police used force on the basis of its own citizens’ skin colour. The police brutality of the time, footage of which so shocked many Americans, is routinely echoed in the news today.
Over his career Mcdonald has reported on great positive changes in racial equality in Britain and America. In hindsight they seem inevitable, but they weren’t. They happened because King, and others like him, led the way.
Civilisations ★★★★
Martin Luther King by Trevor Mcdonald ★★★