Civilisation (TV series)
Civilisation (TV series)
Based on Wikipedia: Civilisation (TV series)
In the spring of 1969, something unprecedented happened on British television. An art historian in his mid-sixties stood before cameras and, across thirteen episodes, attempted to explain what made Western civilisation tick. The result was not merely a documentary series—it was a cultural event that would reshape how television approached serious subjects for the next half-century.
The series was called Civilisation: A Personal View by Kenneth Clark, and that subtitle tells you something important. Clark was not pretending to offer the definitive account. He was sharing one educated man's understanding of how European art, architecture, music, and thought had evolved from the Dark Ages to the twentieth century. The distinction matters, because it freed him to be passionate rather than encyclopedic, opinionated rather than exhaustive.
Two and a half million Britons watched. Five million Americans tuned in. For a high art series—not a soap opera, not a sporting event, not even a nature documentary—these numbers were simply unheard of.
The Man Who Could Speak to Anyone
Kenneth Clark had spent decades preparing for this moment, though he didn't know it. He had been director of the National Gallery in London during the Second World War, when he orchestrated the evacuation of its masterpieces to Welsh slate mines to protect them from German bombs. He had advised governments, written scholarly books, and hobnobbed with everyone from Winston Churchill to Queen Elizabeth.
But what made him perfect for television was something harder to quantify: he could explain complex ideas without condescension. When Clark spoke about why Chartres Cathedral represented a revolution in human thought, ordinary viewers understood. When he traced the link between Renaissance humanism and the paintings of Raphael, the connection felt obvious, inevitable even. He made his audience feel intelligent rather than inadequate.
Clark had actually pioneered art television in Britain starting in 1958, with an experimental series called Is Art Necessary? Over the following eight years, he presented programs on painters ranging from Caravaggio to Picasso. Each one honed his ability to translate visual experience into words.
How It Came Together
The catalyst was David Attenborough—yes, that David Attenborough, decades before he became synonymous with nature documentaries. In 1966, Attenborough was controller of the British Broadcasting Corporation's new second channel, BBC2, and he faced a challenge: Britain was about to switch to color television, and he needed programming that would showcase the new technology.
What better way to demonstrate color than through the world's great paintings?
Attenborough approached Clark with a vague proposal about a series on art. Clark was interested but noncommittal. What finally convinced him was a single word. As Clark later recalled, Attenborough used the term "civilisation" to describe what the series would explore. That word—grand, slightly old-fashioned, undeniably ambitious—captured Clark's imagination.
The resulting production was massive. Clark and his primary director, Michael Gill, spent three years filming in one hundred and seventeen locations across thirteen countries. The budget ballooned to half a million pounds—an enormous sum for the late 1960s, roughly equivalent to five million pounds today. Attenborough had to rejig his broadcast schedules to spread the cost, eventually showing each episode twice during the thirteen-week run.
The filming was technically groundbreaking. Camera crews captured the soaring vaults of Gothic cathedrals and the intimate details of Renaissance paintings with a clarity viewers had never seen. Critics on both sides of the Atlantic would later describe the series as "visually stunning," and in 2011, Jonathan Jones wrote in The Guardian of its "sheer visual beauty... the camerawork and direction rise to the poetry of cinema."
A Journey Through Western Thought
Clark began at the end of the Roman Empire and the beginning of what used to be called the Dark Ages—though he preferred to think of them as a frozen world from which civilisation would eventually thaw.
The first episode traced how Western thought and art survived "by the skin of our teeth." Clark traveled from Byzantine Ravenna, where Roman artistic traditions had retreated, to the Celtic monasteries of the Scottish Hebrides, where Irish monks preserved classical learning while the European mainland descended into chaos. He visited the fjords of Norway to understand the Vikings, and Charlemagne's chapel at Aachen to see the first stirrings of renewal.
From there, each episode tracked a different phase of European consciousness. The twelfth-century awakening that produced Chartres Cathedral. The Italian Renaissance, which Clark portrayed as Europe rediscovering its classical roots. The Reformation, that explosive moment when northern Europeans rejected papal authority and began asking dangerous questions about individual conscience.
Clark covered the Counter-Reformation, when the Catholic Church responded to Protestant challenges with a campaign of aesthetic seduction, filling Rome with the dramatic sculptures of Bernini and the overwhelming grandeur of Saint Peter's Basilica. He explored the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, when telescopes and microscopes revealed new worlds in the sky and in drops of water, and Dutch painters like Rembrandt responded by observing human character with unprecedented realism.
The eighteenth century brought the Enlightenment, which Clark traced from the elegant salons of Paris to the revolutionary politics that followed, and eventually to Thomas Jefferson's Monticello in Virginia. The Romantic movement came next, with its belief that nature had replaced Christianity as the chief creative force in Western culture. Turner's storms, Constable's meadows, Wordsworth's lakes—all testified to this new faith.
The final episodes dealt with more recent history: the disillusionment that followed the French Revolution, when the idealism of Beethoven gave way to the cynicism of Delacroix; and the industrial age, when engineers like Isambard Kingdom Brunel and reformers like William Wilberforce represented two sides of the same humanitarian coin.
What He Left Out (And Why)
Clark was painfully aware of the series' limitations. The subtitle—"A Personal View"—was partly a shield against criticism, but it was also honest. He had deliberately excluded ancient Greece and Rome, Asia, Africa, and the pre-Columbian Americas. His civilisation was specifically Western and specifically European.
He addressed this directly: "I didn't suppose that anyone would be so obtuse as to think that I had forgotten about the great civilisations of the pre-Christian era and the East. However, I confess the title has worried me." He joked that in the eighteenth century, he might have called it something like Speculations on the Nature of Civilisation as illustrated by the Phases of Civilised Life in Western Europe from the Dark Ages to Present Day—but such titles were no longer fashionable.
There were also absences he regretted. "I wanted to include more about law and philosophy," he admitted, "but I could not think of any way of making them visually interesting." This was television, after all. Ideas that couldn't be illustrated had to be shortened or dropped.
Later critics would add to the list of omissions. Clark focused almost exclusively on male artists and thinkers. He paid little attention to economics or practical politics. His approach was dubbed "the great man school of history," and he cheerfully admitted to being a hero-worshipper. When accused of being old-fashioned, he didn't deny it: "I hold a number of beliefs that have been repudiated by the liveliest intellects of our time."
I believe that order is better than chaos, creation better than destruction. I prefer gentleness to violence, forgiveness to vendetta. On the whole I think that knowledge is preferable to ignorance, and I am sure that human sympathy is more valuable than ideology.
It was a statement of faith as much as a defense of methodology.
Impact and Legacy
The impact was immediate and lasting. Art museums in Britain and America reported surges of visitors after each episode aired. Clark's accompanying book has never gone out of print in over fifty years. When the BBC released the series on DVD in 2005, it continued selling thousands of copies annually.
Perhaps more significantly, Civilisation changed what television could be. The broadcaster Huw Wheldon called it "a truly great series, a major work... the first magnum opus attempted and realised in terms of TV." It proved that audiences would watch serious, intellectually demanding programs if those programs were made with enough craft and presented by someone who genuinely knew their subject.
The British Film Institute traces a direct line from Civilisation to virtually every major documentary series that followed. Alastair Cooke's America in 1972. Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man in 1973. Robert Hughes's The Shock of the New in 1980. David Attenborough's own nature documentaries. All of them owe something to what Clark and his team accomplished.
In 2016, The New Yorker echoed the words of the poet John Betjeman, describing Clark as "the man who made the best telly you've ever seen." The magazine's reviewer noted that while "scholars and academics had their understandable quibbles... for the general public the series was something like a revelation."
The Sequels
For decades, no one attempted a direct follow-up. The original series cast too long a shadow. But in 2018, the BBC finally produced Civilisations—note the plural—with three presenters: Mary Beard, David Olusoga, and Simon Schama. Rather than retrace Clark's path through Western Europe, they expanded the scope to include ancient Greece and Rome, Africa, Asia, and the Americas. The sequel was a co-production with PBS in the United States and ran for nine episodes.
In 2025, a further follow-up called Civilisations: Rise and Fall, narrated by Sophie Okonedo, explored the collapse of the Egyptian, Roman, Aztec, and Samurai empires—a subject Clark had touched on only briefly, preferring to focus on creation rather than destruction.
Why It Still Matters
There's a temptation to view Civilisation as a period piece, a product of its time that couldn't be made today. And in some ways that's true. Clark's comfortable assumptions about Western superiority, his focus on male genius, his genial dismissal of economics and politics—all would face more scrutiny now.
But something about the series transcends its limitations. Clark genuinely believed that art and architecture and music and philosophy mattered—not as luxury goods for the educated elite, but as expressions of what makes human beings human. He believed that cathedrals and paintings and symphonies could teach us something about ourselves that we couldn't learn any other way. And he believed that these ideas could be communicated to anyone willing to pay attention.
That faith, more than any particular historical argument, is what made Civilisation revolutionary. It treated its audience as adults capable of sustained thought. It assumed that ordinary people wanted to understand difficult subjects. It proved that television could do more than entertain—it could educate, elevate, and inspire.
The series emerged from a specific cultural moment: post-war Britain, anxious about its place in the world, eager to believe that something valuable had survived the century's catastrophes. Clark offered reassurance. Here, he seemed to say, is what we built. Here is what we preserved. Here is what endured.
Whether that reassurance was warranted—whether Western civilisation deserved the pride Clark took in it—remains a matter for debate. But the series itself stands as an achievement: thirteen hours of television that made millions of people think about beauty, meaning, and the long arc of human creativity.
That is no small thing.