I’ll let you into a small secret — the original inspiration for starting this series of blogs was the weekly e-bulletin issued by Senscot’s co-Founder Laurence Demarco, which contains a wealth of useful information and links, but is made unmissable by Laurence’s very personal musings on his own life and the world around him. Often opinionated, sometimes infuriating, and frequently stimulating, his views are always worth reading, and lighten every Friday.

Last week he was prompted by Niall Ferguson’s current Channel 4 series on the triumph of the West to go back to that programme’s namesake, Kenneth Clark’s mould-breaking ‘Civilisation’, to disinter Clark’s own definition of the term ‘civilisation’—a definition which seems particularly relevant in these confrontational times.

Clark has come in for a lot of stick since ‘Civilisation’ first aired in 1969.  As not only a DWM (dead white male) but, even worse, a tweed-clad toff and (perhaps his greatest sin) father of the repellent Alan Clark, he’s been an easy target.  But, viewing some of the programmes again recently, what comes across to me is Clark’s lack of ego—the diffidence and absence of dogmatism with which he presents his ideas, which were overtly labelled in the series’ strapline as ‘a personal view’.  By comparison too many of today’s ‘big hitter’ presenters—Schama, Starkey, Graham-Dixon, Ferguson himself—can come across as strident and inflexible, brooking no disagreement with their forcefully argued stances.

‘Civilisation’ quite literally changed my life. I was 15 when I saw it, and thanks to my mother and a couple of good art teachers I’d already acquired some interest in art history, but it was Clark’s sweeping and engrossing survey—not forgetting AA Englander’s sumptuous camerawork—which led directly to me putting ‘art history’ down as my first choice when, a year or two later, I filled in my UCCA form for potential university courses. And so my choice of career was set.  Moreover, it was only a few years ago that I realised that our choice of holiday destinations, over the past two decades and more, had been subconsciously shaped by my long term desire to visit the highlights of the series, from Chartres Cathedral to the Arena Chapel and from the Alhambra to the Chateaux of the Loire.

As a scholar, Clark’s reputation has declined over the years, and I doubt if many of his books are widely read today, indeed apart from the ‘book of the series’ most of them seem to be out of print. But perhaps it was exactly this rather lightweight quality which made him such an ideal TV communicator.  Anyone who finds Clark stuffy, by today’s standards, should be shown some earlier manifestations of the TV academic, from the heavily jocular ‘Animal Vegetable Mineral’ to the ‘de haut en bas’ handing down of opinions of The Brains Trust.  By comparison, Clark was lucid, direct and, as I’ve already suggested, modest even when presenting his strongest arguments.

Just three years after ‘Civilisation’ completed its first run on BBC2, its iconic status was already being challenged by a rude upstart: John Berger’s ‘Ways of Seeing’, which infamously opened with the casually-dressed, curly-haired Berger apparently  taking a Stanley knife to the head of Venus from a Botticelli masterpiece.  In the short term Berger’s series of visual essays were seen as more radical, and were perhaps more influential—Judith tells me that the book of the series was the bible for all her fellow art school students in Newcastle—but, for me, ‘Ways of Seeing’ has dated much more obviously than ‘Civilisation’.  Even though Berger—unlike Clark—still has a status close to that of a secular saint, his views as expressed in ‘Ways of Seeing’ now seem modish, contrived, and really rather obvious. I wonder how many of today’s star presenters will seem equally specious in a few years’ time.

Ironically Niall Ferguson’s series, forty years on from its model, offers an explicit justification for focusing primarily on Western civilisation—exactly the imperialist ‘fault’ for which Clark has most often been criticised. But, unlike Ferguson, Clark never sought to justify the parameters of his ‘personal view’ by arguing for the factors which made the dominance of the West inevitable (what Ferguson regrettably calls his ‘killer aps’).

So, what was the key ingredient of ‘civilisation’ which Laurence Demarco went back to Clark’s opus to rediscover? It is, quite simply, ‘courtesy’—a virtue which I can’t help preferring to Ferguson’s rather aggressive triumphalism.

© Robert Livingston