33. The Ascent of Man 1973

by Allan Fish

(UK 1973 651m) DVD1/2

A mosaic of animal and angel

p  Dick Gilling, Adrian Malone  d  Mick Jackson, David John Kennard, Dick Gilling, Adrian Malone  w  Jacob Bronowski  ph  Nat Crosby, John Else, John McGlashan  ed  Paul Carter, Roy Fry, Jim Latham  m  Sheldon Hendler

presented by  Jacob Bronowski  (with Joss Ackland, Roy Dotrice)

“Man is a singular creature.  He has a set of gifts that make him unique among the animals.  Unlike them, he is not a figure in the landscape, he is the shaper of the landscape.”  The opening words to Jacob Bronowski’s mammoth undertaking set in motion what has been long-regarded as the pinnacle of the BBC’s factual programming history.  Upon the release and critical acclaim given to Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation, it was none other than David Attenborough who helped persuade Bronowski to finish the story.  For in truth, Clark told one half of the story in his series, concentrating on man’s advance in art, be it painting, architecture, music, literature, philosophy or sculpture; the aesthetic viewpoint.  Bronowski would take the opposite tack, that of man’s development through science and intellectual ideas, concentrating on the various special needs that drove man on in his ascent to a higher plain.  One might call it the head to Clark’s heart, one unable to exist without the other, and just occasionally, the passion of one meets the analysis of the former, like circles in a Venn Diagram, thus allowing us a depth of appreciation that is even now quite sublime.

Bronowski was of course from a very different background to Clark; not from the ruling class, but a descendant of Polish immigrants who arrived in England via Germany and who exhibits an authority which is equal parts Teutonic and wholly English, a truly multicultural, genetic Renaissance Man.  To the casual viewer in the 21^st century, one might find his approach rather old school, used as we now are to saturation by computer reconstruction and too much emphasis on form.  What does it matter that the state of the art computers of the day are the size of Sherman tanks, or that his choice in ties is the prototype of the eccentric old professors who used to present programmes on the Open University?  What makes Bronowski’s series so special, like Clark’s before it and Simon Schama’s work a generation later, is that it is a personal view, in every sense of the word.

It’s true that if I was forced to choose a favourite between Bronowski’s and Clark’s series, I would choose Civilisation as the aesthetic has always been of greater interest to me than the intellectual – indeed, why would I be writing this work now about the seventh art if that were not the case? – yet it’s fair to say that Bronowski’s is perhaps the more remarkable achievement of the two in that it manages to distil something that much less tangible to the average viewer down to their understanding without ever coming close to patronisation.  In his own words, “science is pure analysis of reductionism, like taking the rainbow to pieces, and art is pure synthesis, putting the rainbow together.”  Bronowski was a more than able commentator on the arts as well as science, and often puts the arts in the context of the evolution of man; for example, to compare his comments on the Gothic cathedrals and the designs of St Peter’s to that of Clark is fascinating to analyse.  There are important sections on such figures as Pythagoras, Galileo, Erasmus, Newton, Pasteur, Darwin, Einstein, et al, yet he does so in very humanist terms.  He covers the essentials of the medieval passion for alchemy, atomics, optics, time, mathematics, astronomy, the search for genetics and the structure of DNA, and even the impulses of sexuality.  His man truly is “the measure of all things”, and yet his greatest success is how he allows his occasional diversions to perfectly illustrate a point he is trying to make.  Nor was he afraid of not only personal interpretation but personal experience, none more cathartic or emotional than his visiting Auschwitz and putting his hand into a pond into which the ashes of many of his relatives may have been tossed.  Sadly, he died a year later, and the stress of making the series may have contributed, but he left TV a legacy worthy of its subject and its author.