At school in the late 1970s, practically the only television we were allowed to watch was Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation on Sunday afternoons in the headmaster’s study. We sat on the floor while Hugh Watts – who founded Moor Park school, near Ludlow, with Derek Henderson after being wounded in the war and playing cricket for Somerset – loaded up an early Philips video-cassette recorder with the weekly tape.
The first episode, “The Skin of Our Teeth”, featured Lord Clark in a tweed suit and tie, standing on a white sandy beach in Iona with part of the ruined abbey in the background. After being founded by St Columba in the 6th century, Iona is described as a tiny holy outpost that Clark calls “secure and sacred”. “I never come to Iona without the feeling that some God is in this place,” he said. Note his use of “some”. By the time of his death in 1983, Clark had converted to Catholicism.
