"What is civilisation?” an erudite English gentleman asks the camera. “I don’t know … but I think I can recognise it when I see it.” And then, turning around to Notre-Dame de Paris behind him, he adds: “And I’m looking at it now.”
It was 50 years ago this month that BBC Two viewers were first treated to Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation: A Personal View, a show that came to define the new highbrow channel, inspired similar epics by Alistair Cooke and Jacob Bronowski, and is today one of just two 20th-century documentaries in the Amazon bestsellers list (the other being The World at War). Only last year the BBC commissioned a sort of re-boot starring Mary Beard, and it’s a rare old TV series that gets long New Yorker articles discussing what it means.
