Back in the Sixties or Seventies it was TV that made the cultural running, showing off its photogenic qualities to make series that were supposed to change the way we thought about ourselves. Huge amounts of dosh were pumped into Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation and Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man as Clark swanned around the Western world displaying gems of creativity, while Bronowski did the same for our intellectual development travelling from Easter Island to Auschwitz and back. Now, though, TV is looking more and more like a blowsy old music-hall star, decked out with cheap glitter but unable to disguise its creaking lack of creativity. Where, for instance, on the TV schedules could you find a series with the same kind of ambition, yet the same value for money, as the huge new series on Radio Four that launches on Monday and runs every weekday morning throughout the year?
For A History of the World in 100 Objects the presenter Neil MacGregor has not moved beyond the four walls of the institution which he directs, the British Museum. To the imaginative breadth of his own mind, plus the help of a few wise commentators such as the Indian philosopher-economist Amartya Sen, the poet Seamus Heaney and our own former editor Boris Johnson, all that needs to be added is a microphone, a digital recorder and of course an excellent production team (Anthony Denselow, Rebecca Stratford and Philip Sellars). Yet MacGregor’s intention is to create a narrative not just of Western art, or Western thought, but also the whole story of human activity from the beginnings of time through a careful selection of just 100 items in the BM’s collection.
You can imagine TV producers throwing up their hands in horror at such limitations of time, location and medium. How can you hope to draw the audience in with so little to attract them? But it’s the very economy of the enterprise that fills the mind with wonder. Each programme lasts for fewer than 15 minutes, yet covers great swathes of history and huge chasms of thought.
MacGregor confides in us that the greatest benefit of being museum director is the opportunity occasionally to handle some of the rarest items in the collection. He picks up and holds in his hands a stone hand axe from the Olduvai gorge in the great African rift valley — ‘a piece of grey- green volcanic rock, very beautiful. It’s the shape of a teardrop’. What more do you need to imagine exactly what he’s talking about?
‘How closely it matches the shape of a human hand,’ he remarks as he turns it over in his hands, observing the marks of the original carver, 1.2 million years ago. A stonemason joins him in the museum to show him how a lump of rock can be turned in just 10–15 minutes into a tool that can kill an animal, strip bark from a tree, butcher an elephant. It requires manual dexterity, but also a conceptual leap — the sculptor’s ability to imagine in a lump of rock the shape you want to make. ‘If you can shape a rock in this way,’ says MacGregor, ‘then you can shape a sentence.’
Each episode ends with almost a minute of specially composed music, peaceful, soothing, like the relaxation at the end of a yoga session. It allows us to think back over what we’ve just heard, to absorb the huge ideas encapsulated in these objects, to imprint the pictures they make in the mind so that we never forget the story behind the swimming reindeer, carved out of a mammoth’s tusk at the end of the last Ice Age with the knowledge of a hunter and the insight of a butcher. It was made for no practical function but just from a delight in the natural world, and the desire, says Rowan Williams, ‘to be part of that flow of life’.
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