Civilising influence
Michael Vestey
A lthough it was first broadcast 34 years ..ago, those who watched Kenneth Clark's series on the history of Western European culture, Civilisation on BBC2, still remember it as one of the great successes of a medium that some still regarded with disdain. The series brought high art to mass audiences without patronising them and, I suspect, encouraged the growth of art history as a serious subject to be studied.
On Radio Four this week, Miranda Carter looked at his life and work in Lord Clark — Servant of Civilisation (Thursday), pointing out that Private Eye's description of him as Lord Clark of Civilisation 'was a pointed reference to his poshness 'This is true but, hearing his delivery again in this programme, the sincerity, intellect and passion with which he conveys his personal view of civilisation, makes the accent irrelevant. Posh voices are unfashionable in broadcasting; so too is Clark himself among art historians, as Carter pointed out. And yet he was a serious scholar, writer and lecturer. Carter, author of Anthony Blunt: His Lives, believes Clark's writings should be reappraised as, between 1930 and the 1970s, he was one of the most influential men in the British art world. Neil MacGregor, former director of the National Gallery and now director of the British Museum, said, 'There's the carefully cultivated image of the patrician, the exquisitely cut suit on a Tuscan hillside, the assumption that this is part of an effortless superiority and breeding. And then, at the other end, there is. I think, without question, the most brilliant cultural populist of the 20th century.'
Clark came from a family of very rich Scottish thread manufacturers. His father, an idle drunk apparently, once gave him a golf course with a hotel attached, and of course he ended up at Saltwood Castle in Kent, later inherited by his elder son, the Tory MP Alan. Clark, though, was energetic and sometimes aloof. His biographer Fram Dinshaw puts this down to a lonely childhood which made him shy, 'a great lecturer but a poor person to talk to after the lecture'. Years later Clark said in an interview that when he was presenting Civilisation and other programmes he never thought of the audience at all. The programmes were soliloquies. 'I was simply talking to myself. I was an only child and I used to take very long walks and on those walks I used to talk to myself.'
Curiously, it was Lew Grade, the showbusiness mogul, who persuaded him to bring high art to the television (Grade also brought A.J.P. Taylor to the screen), though Clark felt happier after transferring to BBC2, which needed programmes like this to demonstrate the quality of colour, which was fairly new at the time. Civilisation was a triumph; innovative, too, in having the presenter standing by the works of art and architecture on location instead of in studio mock-ups. Typically, it was even more popular in America. Catherine Porteous, his assistant, said that Clark had found the two and a half years it took to make the films one of the happiest periods of his life.
The John Humphrys clash with Ben Bradshaw, a junior minister, on Today last Saturday was the most ill-tempered interview I've ever heard on the radio. Bradshaw. once an unmemorable BBC reporter and now a pantingly and excruci
atingly loyal Blairite, appeared on the programme to defend the Prime Minister and Alastair Campbell over the allegation that the government had inserted information into the dossier making the case for an invasion of Iraq, against the wishes of the intelligence services and knowing it to be false; an accusation first made made by Today's defence correspondent, Andrew Gilligan, on the strength of one unattributable source in intelligence.
Bradshaw demanded an apology from the BBC and, because he wouldn't answer some of the questions but kept putting his own to Humphrys, there was a great deal of interrupting which the presenter didn't appear to like (ho, ho). Things seemed to turn personal when Bradshaw said there were many senior journalists in the BBC who were unhappy with the Today allegation. 'Oh, oh, oh. on the contrary, on the contrary, Mr Bradshaw, I have yet to find a single journalist in the BBC ... who takes that view and let me tell you — You obviously don't speak to many.' 'Oh,' replied Humphrys, 'I don't speak to many? All right, that's fine, you speak to more, of course you do. You obviously know how many I've spoken to ... so I bow to your expertise in that area.'
It all sounded rather childish and at the end we were none the wiser. That is, of course, the point of it all from the government's point of view. The more attention is paid to this diversion, the less scrutiny there'll be of the main issue, the possible misleading of Parliament over the weapons of mass destruction. It shows what happens, though, when a Labour government, thinking the BBC is really part of the family, finds that sometimes it can become the embarrassing relation.
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