The Ascent of Man (1973)

A hauntological wander through human history

Every generation recasts the cultural canon, but the Boomers, with their socio-political firepower, blew it all up. From Monty Python to Spike Lee, from Prince to Wolf Hall, they scorned the old orthodoxies, rediscovered forgotten gems and created a whole canon. And then never stopped going on about it. But were their choices… ok?

Polish-British mathematician, polymath and public intellectual Dr Jacob Bronowski puts the ‘70s BBC travel budget to good use by cavorting about the globe – from the Rift Valley to Auschwitz – to tell the story of human progress.

The founder of the BBC and its first Director-General, John Reith, articulated its purpose as being to ‘inform, educate and entertain’. You’ll notice that entertainment comes last. When, in the 1960s, David Attenborough became Controller of BBC 2 (note for non-Brits: yes, that is a job title in the UK; no, we don’t often think about how odd it sounds), he set about fulfilling the first two parts of the BBC remit with a clutch of high concept, high-brow series: Kenneth Clarke’s Civilisation (1969), Alistair Cooke’s America (1972), and Dr Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man (1973), in which the brilliant mathematician and thinker packed the entire history of science, culture and humanity into 13 episodes. As a taster, here’s Wikipedia’s summary of the first four episodes:

1. Lower than the Angels: Evolution of humans from proto-ape to the modern form 400,000 years ago.

2. The Harvest of the Seasons: Early human migration, agriculture and the first settlements, and war.

3. The Grain in the Stone: Tools, and the development of architecture and sculpture.

4. The Hidden Structure: Fire, metals and alchemy.

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The legend

I’ve been hearing about The Ascent of Man my entire life, because in my parents’ considered opinion Bronowski is the public intellectual par excellence. Among other things, my mother has always been thrilled by the fact that Bronowski did the school run for his own children. She thinks she picked this up from a newspaper profile, which sums up a great deal about cult of The Ascent of Man: a great man machete-ing his way out of the halls of academe to bring priceless nuggets of wisdom to the common masses, and being adoringly profiled in the papers in the process. 

Bronowski was famous and feted not for being a pop singer or a comedian, but because he was both clever and knowledgeable, and was able to put the two together in enlightening and engaging ways. Every so often throughout the ‘60s and ‘70s a BBC Outside Broadcast Unit would pull up outside a university, snatch away a badly dressed man, and plonk him down again in front of a UNESCO heritage site, where he would gesticulate vigorously to camera while monologuing about art history or scientific discovery. This was done simply because these men knew what they were talking about, and were entertaining when talking about it.

This is not the sort of documentary that gets made much in the twenty-first century. Aware of a thousand competing TV channels and the knowledge that the audience is not watching any of them but staring at their phones instead, the twenty first century documentary dare not do anything difficult or thoughtful. Instead inexplicable celebrities are shoehorned into bland social history that’s the factual TV equivalent of lazy observational comedy: ‘What is it with spoons? There’s always one we hate and never use, am I right?’ An unthreatening face looks up from a bowl of soup: ‘All my life, I’ve wondered where spoons come from - and now I’m going on a journey to discover their extraordinary story.’ This is followed by half an hour of ineptly summarised history. Academics – who, if they were allowed to speak, might tell us something we didn’t already know – are confined to nodding in the background. ‘Join us at 9 tonight on BBC2 as Ben Fogle digs into spoons.’

The Ascent of Man was the BBC doing what it was supposed to do: educating and informing, with a little bit of entertainment slipped in, like the proportion of insect cadavers that is legally allowed in jam.

The reality

The Ascent of Man is, of course, a thing extremely of its time. Erudite and complex pieces to camera are interspersed with Blue Peter-style demonstrations of scientific principles using bits of driftwood found on the beach.  There are hauntological interludes in which prog electronica burbles under library footage of sunsets and stop-motion plants. Large parts of it are essentially a Boards of Canada video. And yes, there, in the credits: Ken Morse! Rostruming away over mediaeval woodcuts like a good ‘un. Gen X viewers will be reminded of the times when the cuboid school TV was wheeled into the classroom, bringing with it the promise of a somnolent half hour in front of Programmes for Schools: resource extraction in Silesia, an introduction to business French. 

Of course, a great deal of the history in The Ascent of Man is of its time too. You could pick any number of arguments with the title alone. ‘Man’? That’s terribly sexist, obviously. And even if we accept it as a common shorthand for ‘human’ – which you wouldn’t, nowadays – it still conflicts with an holistic vision of humankind existing within an ecology. What about the heavy hands of disease and natural disaster and climate, aimlessly spinning the wheel of fortune like a lackadaisical croupier on the roulette of history? Isn’t ‘of’ unnecessarily possessive? Does scientific progress ‘belong’ to anyone? It hints of an innately capitalist way of looking at the world. And ‘Ascent’? Give me a break. The whole idea of human culture as an inevitable progress – the Whig version of history – is outdated; it takes some cheek to talk about ‘Ascent’ when your penultimate episode is about the Holocaust. 

As the subtitle says, this is the ‘personal view’ of Dr Bronowski. It’s just, like, his opinion, man. As in an Oxbridge humanities tutorial, you are expected to disagree with him; and if you aren’t familiar with Oxbridge humanities tutorials, why are you watching BBC2? To which the answer is: it’s bloody 1973. There are only three TV channels. They shut down in the afternoon and play the National Anthem before going off-air at midnight. This little gnome of a man quacking away in a field, looking like Hoggle from Labyrinth in NHS specs: this is the only entertainment available. 

You could see all this as the patronising elitism of the old-school BBC writ large.

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Is it OK?

Or you could see it as the glory and treasure of the old-school BBC writ large.

The BBC’s nickname ‘Auntie’ derives from the phrase ‘auntie knows best’. This is how the BBC was characterised: establishment figures, the private school and University educated middle classes, intent on improving the nation and educating the unwashed. Oxford graduate Joy Whitby comissioned RADA-trained actors to read Kaye Webb’s Puffin-approved classics on Jackanory. Shrewsbury-educated John Peel was going to make us listen to The Fall whether we liked it or not (usually not). Gurkha officer Tony Hart was going to make us colour inside the lines.

Except that, of course, no one was making anyone do anything. They were, like Tony Hart, enthusing us, inspiring us, inviting us in to these new worlds of knowledge and art. How else would we have discovered these things? Was the Capital Radio breakfast show going to play us The Fall’s 1978 single ‘No Xmas for John Quays’? Was school going to make us read the Swedish comedy detective stories of Agaton Sax? How were we supposed to know about the transmission of Greek knowledge through Arabic writings into mediaeval Spain, without Dr Bronowski to tell us about it?

There is a legendary story about that first Director-General, John Reith, leaving Broadcasting House one night in the 1930s. As Reith approached the front doors, the doorman - who had been listening to that evening’s physics lecture on the National Programme - greeted him with a hearty: ‘Good evening, Lord Reith! What’s new in thermodynamics?’ This story is told to illustrate the somewhat ludicrous indigestibility of early BBC radio programming. But the alternative reading is that it was digested, with pleasure, by people whose curiosity and intelligence outstripped their formal education. From the very beginning, the BBC’s entertainment came with a crucial serving of wholesome information and education.

In the final episode of The Ascent of Man Bronowski argues that what matters most in human history – and in the human present – are those BBC values, information and education. His contention was that without them, ‘Western civilisation’ would decline, and the 21st century would be dominated by China and India. We can argue with this, but we can only do so because, in the intervening 50 years, we have been informed and educated, often by those who Bronowski informed and educated first.

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For an entirely different form of BBC documentary, there’s always the obscure ‘90s series about people and their cars: ‘From A to B’