Kenneth Clark

by James Stourton

  However, while he was travelling around India, the ITA was offered a token £100,000 by the government. Without any reference to the ITA the four (by now profitable) programme companies collectively issued a statement declaring that they were turning down the offer, believing that it implied they could not stand on their own feet. Clark was furious, stating that the companies had made the ITA look foolish and were usurping its authority – the grant was none of their business, but represented a gesture of confidence in the Authority and an important point of principle. His meeting with the programme companies on 14 December was stormy, and he did not mince his words. He felt the most important thing was the precedent for payment of a grant in future years. The money was duly collected and the crisis passed.

  Clark came to the end of his term in August 1957, and was slightly miffed not to be invited to renew his contract. Notwithstanding the ‘bolting horse’ episode, he was regarded as having been an outstanding success. Even Charles Hill wrote in his memoirs: ‘What he proved by the undoubted courage and wisdom he brought to an appallingly difficult task was that a cultivated mind does not necessarily exclude a capacity for administration. Independent Television owes a very great deal to Kenneth Clark.’35 Clark knew that he had succeeded, as he told Berenson: ‘My television years are over. I was a great success and beloved by all! An experience I never had in the art world.’36 However, he was to devastate his former colleagues by his appearance at the Pilkington Committee on Broadcasting in 1960, at which he argued against the introduction of more channels and longer broadcasting hours on the grounds that they would unleash a torrent of rubbish. He regarded over-production as ‘much the most serious danger to television’.37

  The historian of Independent Television, Bernard Sendall, who had worked closely with Clark, shrewdly summed up his time at the ITA: ‘Kenneth Clark was a kind of Jekyll and Hyde in television affairs. There was the Jekyll who launched ITV and saw it through its initial difficulties with brilliant success. He was tolerant and considerate and displayed infinite resource. He withdrew after three years, to the universal disappointment of his ITV friends. He states that he was not asked to stay on and hated leaving. There was the Hyde who subsequently presented disparaging and destructive evidence to the Pilkington Committee. He was an aesthete and an individual, and yet in his dealings with the whole range of Independent Television, from the tycoons to the bureaucrats, he showed no hint of condescension.’38

  Clark was given a lavish leaving party, to which all his friends from the companies came. One had a particular mission that night. For some time Lew Grade had been asking Clark to make arts programmes for ATV, as he later recalled: ‘ “Kenneth, I would like you to do an arts piece on the great artists of the world.” He said, “You can’t talk to me about me doing any programmes while I am still Chairman of the ITA.” The day he was due to retire there was a big party for him. I knew at 12 o’clock he would terminate as Chairman and I kept looking at my watch. At one minute past twelve I went up to him and asked if he would do my programme. He said yes.’39 Although Clark had already made several programmes, this was the true beginning of arguably his most successful career – as a presenter of the arts on television.

  * * *

  *1 The appearance of a chimpanzee called ‘J. Fred Muggs’ in a commercial which interrupted the US television broadcast of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation was thought by one Labour politician to be particularly tasteless. See Sendall, Independent Television in Britain, Vol. I: Origin and Foundation 1946–1962 (p.15).

  *2 Look magazine, 7 September 1971. In an interview with Mark Amory in 1974 Clark said: ‘The BBC had got a complete monopoly, like the early Puritan Church in America.’

  *3 Colston was a fundraiser for the Conservative Party, and resigned shortly afterwards. Sir Ronald Matthews took his place, and things worked harmoniously thereafter.

  *4 Clark’s salary was set at £3,000 per annum. The only board member who knew anything about the subject was the film critic Dilys Powell.

  *5 Clark’s speech was, however, overshadowed by the death of Grace Archer in the long-running radio serial The Archers: ‘The following morning there was far more comment – along with far more leaders – in the press about Grace’s death than there were about the Guildhall speech.’ Asa Briggs, The BBC: The First Fifty Years (p.259).

  *6 The companies were allowed to broadcast a maximum of eight hours of television per day between 9 a.m. and 11 p.m., with an off period between 6 and 7 p.m., known as the ‘toddlers’ truce’, to allow parents to get children off to bed. On Sundays there was to be no transmission between 6.15 and 7.30 p.m., to protect Evensong.

  *7 Robin Day, Day by Day (pp.178–82): ‘What I think gave the interview its interest was that the chairman of an organisation was being publicly cross-examined about his duties by one of his employees. This was unusual, if not unique.’

  *8 See Bournemouth ITA Archive (Box 254). Clark even asked one of the technicians how long it would take him to properly understand the technical questions concerning masts and transmitters. The answer was discouraging: if he did nothing else, three years would be the minimum.

  *9 Letter to Janet Stone, 1 November 1956 (Bodleian Library). Clark later said of Anthony Eden (who was an old friend): ‘Suez was really a blessing in disguise, because, revolting as it was, it allowed the Tories to get rid of our worst prime minister since Lord North.’ Letter to Janet Stone, 12 April 1964.

  28

  The Early Television Programmes

  Since my first programmes I have never thought of the camera for a second. I have felt that I was talking to a friend, or more often soliloquising.

  KENNETH CLARK, The Other Half 1

  Shortly after his resignation as chairman of the ITA, Clark took part in a BBC panel discussion about the future of television with Jacob Bronowski, who would one day present The Ascent of Man, the scientist’s answer to Civilisation.2 Clark offered the opinion that television would not influence art, but was culturally important in itself. Both he and Bronowski, however, were hard-pressed to think of examples that might demonstrate this. Nobody at that time could have foreseen that the two men were the answer to their own question. Clark and his interlocutor were to produce the two series that would define how culture could be conveyed on television, and make a contribution to culture itself. However, before Clark made Civilisation he presented or took part in nearly sixty programmes, which helped to establish a cultural agenda on British television.3 For a decade, presenting television lectures was his main occupation.

  Clark once gave his Arts Council colleague Alan Bowness a piece of advice: ‘If you want to do television you must dedicate yourself to it.’4 His early programmes are a curiosity today. Through them we can follow the technical improvements in the medium that took place during the 1960s, and his own growing ease with the camera. The studio-bound limitations of his earliest black-and-white efforts – in which he is effectively delivering a Slade Lecture on camera – are gradually replaced by the on-location sophistication and colour of Royal Palaces. Clark and television were growing up together, and he was learning how to charm an audience. He was never to be a television ‘personality’ in the sense of John Betjeman or A.J.P. Taylor – Clark was a populariser without being populist. But in a world of only two channels he often achieved higher audiences for his ATV programmes than he later did with the vastly more influential Civilisation.

  Lew Grade gave Clark a very clear instruction: he wanted him to tell people about art in the same way that Clark spoke to him on the subject, which he found mesmerising. Denis Forman thought that ‘although Lew was the most philistine of moguls, he was a simple man who recognised something that worked’.5 Val Parnell and Lew Grade’s company, ATV, which had the franchise for the weekend in London and weekdays in the Midlands, had emerged from show business. Clark’s contract was as a consultant on programme planning, for which he was paid £2,500 a year. In addition he was expected to make between ten and fifteen films, fo
r each of which he would receive an extra £200.6

  ATV also provided him with a £53 television set; when asked what he watched, he said, ‘I enjoy plays about detectives and policemen.’ His problem was how to compete with these popular dramas. He planned a series entitled Is Art Necessary?, a natural development from his wartime BBC radio series Art and the Public. ATV put out a press release describing how Clark ‘and distinguished experts will approach a wide range of cultural subjects with an adventurous spirit’. They were also to ‘sharply illuminate conflicts of opinion’. Titles in preparation (they always posed a question, but not all were adopted) were: Is Opera Absurd?, Is Art Necessary in Public?, Need We Talk?, Isn’t he Beautiful?, and one about contemporary architecture, Is Your Cornice Necessary? As Clark explained to Benjamin Britten when inviting him to talk about opera: ‘The form of each programme is to take an art which can be made interesting by television, and begin by accepting, perhaps caricaturing, the philistine view about it, and then gradually winning people round to recognising that it is important after all.’7

  The first programme to be made, Isn’t he Beautiful? (1958), directed by Leonard Brett, opens with Colin Clark’s enormous dog Plato, a Great Dane,8 and a voice-over repeating, ‘Isn’t he beautiful?’ It develops into a very stiff panel discussion, with a horse-breeder and a dog-breeder who calls Clark ‘sir’. Clark described it as ‘one of the worst programmes ever put on’.9 Things improved with his intriguing second ATV film, which has only survived in fragmentary form, Encounters in the Dark, in which Clark and Henry Moore visit the British Museum after closing time in winter, flashing their torches at Assyrian sculpture and Egyptian heads. Clark was on home ground, and ‘several people have said to me that I seemed much more at ease in the British Museum film than talking direct to camera’.10 So when he planned the next film, Should Every Picture Tell a Story?, he stuck to the same format – this time interviewing Somerset Maugham in the south of France about Victorian art, and his new acquaintance John Berger about the subject-matter of Picasso’s Guernica. As he told the producer, Quentin Lawrence, ‘the vitality of this programme would depend on Berger and myself getting into some sort of argument’11 – which they did in a very polite way, discussing whether Guernica was a piece of popular art. Clark thought not.

  The man who taught Clark to speak directly to camera was Michael Redington, who became his favourite producer. Redington, a genial and modest man, was an actor by trade who started at the Old Vic. He first became aware of Clark when an oversize bunch of flowers was delivered there for Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh.*1 When Redington joined ATV in 1955 he pioneered religious programmes for the so-called ‘toddlers’ truce’, when transmission was interrupted so that mothers could get their children off to bed. His job in charge of Clark’s programmes, he explained, ‘was to put K at ease. My acting experience was very useful and I wanted to make K a bit of an actor himself.’12 The first film they made together was What is Good Taste?13 Clark by now maintained that all efforts to improve taste were a mistake – the moment you tell somebody what to do, it is no longer their taste. He had come a long way since The Gothic Revival, when he had believed that there was a rule of taste. What made this film memorable was the ploy of Clark examining a so-called ‘good taste’ room and a ‘bad taste’ room, the latter including a hideously bad-taste sideboard from a hotel in Shrewsbury, ‘so monstrous as to be amiable’. He smoked a small cigar as he moved between the ‘bad taste’ room, with flying ducks and heavily patterned wallpaper, and into an all-white, modernist ‘good taste’ room. Clark’s sympathies lay with the former, which he thought showed more humanity. What is Good Taste? was watched by three million viewers; it was the first of the series to be considered successful. Redington said, ‘People loved What is Good Taste? And from then on I think we caught the right note.’14

  Clark rapidly realised that good arts television had three ground rules: every word must be scripted in advance; viewers require information, not ideas; and the commentary must be clear, economical and energetic. The early programmes were usually live transmissions, so it was essential to plan every detail in advance. Redington and Clark adopted a regular way of working together: ‘K would write the scripts and give me a list of pictures in his tiny handwriting, which we would then have to find from around the world, and blow them up for the studio. He would always start with the pictures and then write the scripts to the pictures.’15 After that Clark would ask his secretary, Audrey Scales, ‘to transfer the scripts to postcards, although he would try and learn them by heart. Irene Worth coached him a bit and he would walk along the seafront at Hythe practising and consolidating his lines.’16 On transmission night, ATV would send a car to take Clark to the converted studios at either the Wood Green Empire or the Hackney Empire (Val Parnell had come up through variety, and the early ATV television studios were old music halls). Redington remembers: ‘We would go through a practice run with K and then leave for dinner, usually at a station hotel [station hotels were usually good places to eat in 1960s Britain], St Pancras, Liverpool Street or Euston, depending which studio. K would always say, “I have ordered the wine,” in a very debonair fashion, then a car would take us all back to the studio for transmission at 10.30 p.m. There was always a very good atmosphere in the studio and K had a teleprompter. He was extremely professional and very rarely fluffed a line. At the end I would throw up my hands and say, “Well done! K Clark has done it again!” ’17 Clark formed a very good rapport with the film crews, as Redington attested: ‘We never had any trouble with him and he was always at ease. We knew nothing of his private life.’18

  The Is Art Necessary? series came to an end in 1959 with a particularly awkward programme, What is Sculpture? Clark felt something was wrong with the programmes, and called a meeting at his office in St James’s Square. He told Redington: ‘They’re not working, are they? What we want to do is tell stories, that’s what people like, isn’t it, a narrative.’ The solution was a new series entitled Five Revolutionary Painters, featuring Goya, Bruegel, Caravaggio, Rembrandt and Van Gogh. It proved to be a very successful format, and looking back Clark described the effect of the programmes to Ben Nicolson: ‘I remember how all the porters at Charing Cross used to talk to me about them, and [the publisher] Alan Dent was astonished to encounter a conversation about Caravaggio in a pub in Covent Garden.’19 Clark enjoyed the attention: ‘I like being a film star.’20 The News Chronicle thought that Five Revolutionary Painters were the best programmes Clark had made, but noted his awkward pose – ‘a steady unblinking profile like one of Peter Scott’s marine iguanas’.21 If Redington and Clark were stung by this criticism they certainly acted on it, because in 1960 they made the programme which is a milestone among Clark’s television appearances.

  The 1960 Picasso exhibition at the Tate Gallery was hugely anticipated by a London still uncertain what to make of the artist. Clark persuaded the Tate to let ATV film the exhibition in the very short interval between hanging and opening. There were many critics who knew more about Picasso than Clark, but his was a reassuring presence to viewers, particularly as he was only a half-believer. The man who had told them about Rembrandt could be trusted on Picasso. The film could not be shot live, as Clark and the crew were only allowed into the exhibition at six in the morning on Sunday (for a Monday-evening transmission), and they had to be out of the gallery by 1 o’clock for the public. It was Clark’s best performance to date, full of energy and vim. As he looked at Les Demoiselles d’Avignon he exclaimed: ‘Now we are off! Modern painting has begun.’ He was fascinated, but not entirely convinced, by Les Demoiselles, and had the courage to say so, characterising the artist as ‘an entertainer and incomparable clown’. He generally preferred Picasso’s abstract pictures to his representational paintings, and referred to each change of style as an ‘eruption’. He described Picasso’s love–hate relationship with the human form, in which hate got the upper hand – ‘It is doubtful how far an art form will go based on hate’ –
and spoke of the ‘shocking reality of Picasso’s abstractions’. He regretted the lack of drawing and sculpture in the exhibition, and admired Picasso’s ‘throb of creative power’. The film is a tour de force of memory and coordinated movement: walking and talking under pressure of time from room to room without stumbling over the carefully composed script. The choreography between words, body movement and objects is mastered. As Fram Dinshaw remembered: ‘The early TV programmes are imbued with condescension. The change comes when he takes the viewer round the Picasso exhibition and is himself for the first time.’22

  Clark, however, was worried that he was getting stale, and told Bob Heller,*2 a senior executive at ATV, ‘it is certain that my talks on art will exhaust themselves fairly soon and that the viewer will want a fresh face and a new approach’.23 Clark’s solution once again was to change the subject – this time to architecture. He suggested that ‘as the BBC has specialised in savages, black people, and animals, could they do a series on Cities, not just picturesque ones like Rio but a new Russian town?’24 The idea developed into his making three programmes with the architectural critic and apologist for modernist architecture, Reyner Banham.*3 Clark was disappointed by most modern architecture, and as time went by he became an increasingly vocal conservationist, but in 1960 he was still trying to come to terms with modernism and relate it to the great buildings of the past.

  He was on surer ground when he proposed making a series on Great Temples of the World: San Marco in Venice, Chartres Cathedral and Karnak. Bob Heller responded with a resounding yes, and added percipiently, ‘you are unmatched as an interpreter of civilisations from the monuments and the objects’.25 It took four years before this series went into production, and – to Clark’s chagrin – Michael Redington was not available to produce it. He described filming San Marco at night: ‘My producer is an amiable gorilla, very slow and stupid, who occasionally has thoughts which he wrestles with like Laocoon while his camera crew stand round in undisguised impatience. The cameraman is excellent, and with him alone I would have done the job in two days.’26 The writer J.R. Ackerley happened to watch San Marco, and pronounced it ‘sheer magic’, but others thought the Chartres programme more successful, because Clark loved the place so much.27 Karnak was the most comical, because although some of the shots were done on location by local cameramen, most of the script was delivered by Clark in a London studio, wearing a white golfing hat with an enormous photograph of the pyramids of Giza behind. The general verdict was ‘hokey as hell’.