Kenneth Clark

by James Stourton

  Another meeting was arranged at Albany, at which Clark outlined to the BBC management team his plan for an opening sequence in Paris, which seemed clichéd to Gill. He wanted something more original, and challenged the ideas Clark was putting over. The atmosphere was becoming arctic when the double doors to the bedroom were flung open and ‘a plump but impressive figure swayed between them’. It was Jane, who wanted another drink, lit a cigarette, dropped it on the floor and then berated the visitors: ‘I don’t want you pestering him…K’s a genius worth all of you together. He has to be protected.’20 It took all of Attenborough’s diplomatic skills to reassure her.

  Over the coming weeks Clark sent two scripts to Gill, who rejected them both as being too much like lectures. This power struggle alarmed Wheldon and Attenborough. Clark was certainly not used to being treated like this – he was not only a grandee, but he thought he knew how television worked. It was Colin who persuaded his father to give Gill another chance: ‘You are wrong, Papa…I know Michael and he is the most imaginative man, try again.’21 The final panda-mating session took place at Saltwood. Clark told Janet: ‘My producer rang up to say that he didn’t like my first two scripts, and thought I had better make a fundamental change of approach. I was much upset, as I had spent three months on the general plan of the series, and couldn’t see another way in which I could do it. Also, I didn’t think my scripts so bad. Anyway, he came down for the day on Friday and his objections didn’t amount to much – or his courage failed him, I am not sure which. His chief objection was that my script wasn’t personal enough (I had thought it was too personal). I told him I was no [Malcolm] Muggeridge, and could not get away with a display of opinions and prejudices. What people wanted from me was 1) Information 2) Clarity 3) Human stories. This is my experience after doing over 60 programmes. However, it’s a good thing to have this kind of criticism, as it makes one sit up. He is a nice chap, tho’ not quite as clever as he thinks he is, and much the victim of modern mind-food.’22

  The BBC began to assemble a talented team for the production. The series was too much for one director, and Peter Montagnon was appointed to make four of the episodes. Montagnon is a gentle and cultivated man, whom Clark described as ‘an educator and something of a poet (formerly a sculptor and then a member of the secret service)’.23 The third director, who only made one episode (number four), was Ann Turner. She was the most knowledgeable of the team, a first-rate technician in charge of the logistics and stills. Clark said she ‘made the impression of senior tutor in a ladies’ college’.24 The lighting and camera crew, ‘Tubby’ Englander and Ken Macmillan, came from Royal Palaces. Macmillan was to become Clark’s favourite on the crew: ‘he was an artist, silent, withdrawn and independent’.25 Tubby Englander was ‘a small and compact man, with a neat moustache and horn-rimmed spectacles, always impeccably dressed in a dark suit, which contrasted oddly with the conventionally unconventional garments of the crew’.26 Macmillan describes their first reaction to being put on the team: ‘We just thought of it as another arts series. We had no idea of the scale or ambition. The key moment was David Attenborough’s decision to shoot on 35mm, which quadrupled the picture quality and greatly increased the cost. Royal Palaces was the only previous 35mm colour film done at the BBC.’27 The decision also multiplied by several times the amount of equipment that would need to be hauled around Europe. Clark initially asked if he could have two consultants, Ernst Gombrich and John Hale, and the three of them met for lunch at the St James’s Club. Peter Montagnon remembers ‘Gombrich turning up to script meetings and he had a precision that was valuable. K listened to him and could be swayed.’28 Clark’s contract with the BBC is dated 13 January 1968. He was to receive £800 per episode, which was raised to £1,000 for the last eight after he complained about all the travelling.29 The fee was low compared with Royal Palaces, but the possibility of sales rights was greater, and he received over £10,000 on these, before the main bonanza of the publication of the book.30

  Once Michael Gill and Clark each began to accept what the other wanted, their cooperation was to be cordial and beneficial. As Attenborough has explained: ‘K had sufficient humility to know that he was moving into a new category of documentary…and eventually produced the sort of thing Gill and Montagnon were looking for. The sort of thoughts I think that Michael and Peter gave K were how in fact he would be placed within the picture and when was he to be moving and when was the moment for reflection. Particularly when was the moment when words had to come to an end, and when the skill of the director could take stills of pictures, buildings and landscapes and people, and allow that to be put together in such an imaginative way with the right kind of music, that it would make the right impact. Not merely a pause between thought but something powerful. Those montages when they turn up are one of the great glories of the series.’31 Montagnon thought that Clark was ‘a useful commodity in TV terms, but there was the problem of his being so mannered and this we had to take into account. We wanted K to look more human.’32

  There was one ugly episode early in the story. The three directors had been invited down to Saltwood for planning purposes, and Montagnon noticed that ‘Jane was drunk, which worried us. What effect would it have on the series to have an anchorman with a psychotic wife? I discussed it with my psychoanalyst wife who said she would be very unpredictable, which was correct.’33 Jane, who put her husband’s television essays well below his books in order of importance, thought that Civilisation was a bad idea, and wanted him to finish Motives. She decided to be disruptive, and towards the end of the lunch announced that the Queen Mother had been to Saltwood recently, and had left generous tips for the staff. She failed to mention that the Queen Mother had arrived with an enormous entourage, and had spent the night. The figure Jane suggested was £20, a large sum which none of the visitors could muster in cash.* When Montagnon offered a cheque, Clark said that that would be acceptable, but Jane countered with, ‘You’d better be careful, K, it might bounce.’ Montagnon later reflected on ‘the tip business; we put it down to her drunkenness. We thought it outrageously funny at the time, and of course we claimed it back from the BBC.’ But they were surprised by Jane’s behaviour – as Ann Turner put it, ‘We thought it was all a bit much.’ The most extraordinary part of the story is that Clark backed his wife’s preposterous demand; his peculiar code of chivalry meant that he would never publicly cross her.

  There remained one serious argument – over the title of the series. Gill did not like the word ‘civilisation’, and Clark did not want the word ‘art’ to be in it – he thought it would put most English people off. Reverting to old practice, he wanted to turn the title into a question ‘What is Civilisation?’ – but the trouble was, he didn’t know the answer. He thought of civilisation negatively: he knew what it was not, but he could not define it: ‘Civilisation was not a state but a process; and what I must look for was not civilisation, but civilisations.’34 ‘No a priori definition of civilisation was ever going to work. Like Goethe, one could only describe its growth, the discovery of courtesy in the thirteenth century, of reason in the seventeenth century, toleration and love of nature in the eighteenth century, humanitarianism in the nineteenth century.’35 When he described it to Janet, he wrote: ‘Civilisation is very largely the shape given to a sudden flow of creative energy. It involves curiosity, fluidity, confidence and hope. Now fit the works of art and architecture into that.’36

  He decided, as a starting point for the series, to adopt a Clarkian antithesis, finding the most barbarous epoch (the seventh century, in his view) and using this as a zero point from which to look backwards and forwards. ‘I was determined to show Western man trying to discover himself,’ he explained in an interview. ‘I was also determined to show that civilisation could die by its own inbred imperfection. In this I was influenced in reaction, I think, by books like Clive Bell’s book on Civilisation, which put forward the thesis that civilisation meant good company and going to bed with anyone you liked.’3
7 In his notebook he asked himself the question ‘What are the enemies of Civilisation?’, and divides his answer between ‘external’ (war, plagues, etc.) and ‘internal’ (rigidity, exhaustion, lack of confidence, hopelessness, disintegration). It was in these latter that he found such a troubling echo in the contemporary world. The programmes were imbued with the warning that civilisations do not crumble from without, but from within. With reflections like these Clark won the battle of the title, but for everyday purposes he dubbed it ‘Civvy’, and that was the name the crew adopted.38

  * * *

  * Tipping after lunch was never expected in a country house, and even after spending a night, £1 per night per person would have been considered generous in 1967.

  32

  The Making of Civilisation

  It was heaven, visits to all my favourite places, congenial people and returning to all my favourite books.

  KENNETH CLARK on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, 19 March 19691

  Civilisation came at exactly the right time for Kenneth Clark. His programmes with ATV were running out of steam, and although he still believed himself capable of writing the ‘great book’, he couldn’t grasp it. He had become depressed, and felt imprisoned at Saltwood.*1 The making of the series transformed his outlook; nothing he had done previously had so enjoyably combined his love of art, writing and action. It is easy to believe that Clark was put into the world to make Civilisation. He always claimed that he sat down and wrote each programme without any special reading – when asked if he had undertaken any research he replied, ‘None at all. Quite to the contrary. All I did was to forget things. The difficulty was to eliminate.’2 This is borne out by his ability to write what many regard as the finest episode, Grandeur and Obedience, in only three days while in Rome.3 He did however go back to original sources, such as Luther’s letters. He wrote most of the episodes at Saltwood, and his altered mood is caught on a warm day in May 1967, when he wrote to Janet: ‘I am not one for the physical life, but on an afternoon like this I can think only of my love, and not of the question of how much the dome of St Peter’s is really by della Porta…Add to the warmth the scent of lily of the valley and narcissi which our gardener’s dear wife has put in my room, and you can see that I am in an extasy [sic] like a Baroque Saint.’4

  Elimination was indeed the difficulty, and the greatest problems were presented by Versailles and Spain. Neither appealed to Clark, but he agonised over them, ‘and got very depressed about it. But last night Jane said: “Why bring in Louis XIV?” and with this the cloud lifted. I really hate him and the whole concept of Versailles and I think it anti-civilisation. Whereas I think the Rome of the Popes, and the Counter-Reformation was a creative moment – or century almost. Instead of the horrible king one has the saints – Carlo Borromeo, Philippo Neri, to say nothing of Sta Teresa and S. Ignatius Loyola so I am now rubbing up my Catholic resolution with great enthusiasm. What a fan mail of Protestant abuse I shall receive!’5 In the end Versailles made only a brief appearance, and Clark showed little sympathy for courts in general (apart from those of Urbino and Mantua).

  Spain presented a greater problem, and its omission would cause lasting offence to the Hispanic world. Clark conceded that had he been writing a history of art, Spain would have had to feature; but he compounded his difficulties when he attempted to explain: ‘When one asks what Spain has done to enlarge the human mind and pull mankind a few steps up the hill, the answer is less clear. Don Quixote, the Great Saints, the Jesuits in South America? Otherwise she has simply remained Spain, and since I wanted each programme to be concerned with a development of the European mind, I could not change my ground.’6 The fact that Spain was at the time a totalitarian state under General Franco did nothing to commend it to Clark; nonetheless, as Peter Montagnon recalled: ‘Most of us were a bit edgy and nervous when he didn’t propose to put in Spain as a subject or what went on in Spain…he was capable of being imperious…sometimes he wanted to argue things out with us and sometimes he didn’t. But I think that’s a function of his age and background.’7

  Programmes were scripted to every single word, which generally negated last-minute changes of mind. Clark was usually content with his taxonomy, but told Janet: ‘My chief mental occupation is the realisation that I must add another programme to the series on the Classical ideal. It would be absurd to leave out Palladio, Poussin, Racine etc. the hard core of Civilisation.’8 The BBC did not smile upon the idea; its three-month, thirteen-episode scheduling was sacrosanct, and therefore the Classical ideal was reduced to an uneasy preface to the Rococo episode. The central narrative of each programme was structured around three or four heroes. Michael Gill was initially against all these ‘old warhorses’ being trotted out, but Clark was a natural hero-worshipper, and saw that the character of an epoch would be more vividly portrayed by describing individuals of genius than by attempting to expound an abstract idea.9 As he realised, the problem was always how to keep the story visible. Gill gave Clark a bit of script leeway, as Ann Turner recalled: ‘Michael very wisely said to him, no, he must go to the places and re-feel them as it were, because what he felt when he was a young man in the thirties might be very different to how he felt in the sixties.’10 He was right, and Clark was allowed to make some unscripted additions at Assisi.

  A BRIEF SUMMARY OF THE EPISODES OF CIVILISATION

  1 The Skin of Our Teeth*2: The Dark Ages, the survival of Christianity and the establishment of Charlemagne’s empire.

  2 The Great Thaw: The reawakening of Europe, the great cathedrals of France.

  3 Romance and Reality: The Gothic spirit and chivalry, culminating in St Francis of Assisi and the genius of Giotto and Dante.

  4 Man the Measure of All Things: Humanism, the Florentine Renaissance and the court of Urbino.

  5 The Hero as Artist: The patronage of Pope Julius II and the High Renaissance; Raphael, Leonardo and Michelangelo.

  6 Protest and Communication: Printing and the Reformation: Erasmus, Dürer, Luther, Montaigne and Shakespeare.

  7 Grandeur and Obedience: The Counter-Reformation, the rebuilding of St Peter’s in Rome; Bernini and the Baroque.

  8 The Light of Experience: Art and philosophy in northern Europe, the establishment of science, Newton.

  9 The Pursuit of Happiness: The great Rococo churches of Germany; Bach, Handel, Mozart and Watteau.

  10 The Smile of Reason: The French Enlightenment, the Paris salons, the Encyclopaedia, Voltaire, the Scottish Enlightenment, the founding of the United States.

  11 The Worship of Nature: The new belief in the divinity of nature; Rousseau, Wordsworth, Turner and Impressionism.

  12 The Fallacies of Hope: The Romantic movement, the French Revolution, Beethoven, Byron, David, Delacroix.

  13 Heroic Materialism: Nineteenth-century humanitarianism, the Industrial Revolution, Brunel, Tolstoy – and the confused and destructive twentieth century.

  Peter Montagnon believes that Civilisation had its own organic development, and remarkably few principles were established: ‘We sucked it and saw.’11 Ken Macmillan agrees: ‘We worked so hard we never thought about the real importance of what we were doing. We never thought about the context of Civilisation in its times. We were artisans who made no intellectual judgements.’12 The filming of the programmes was driven by economics and logistics – getting the camera in the right place at the right time. It was Ann Turner’s job to overcome the extraordinary difficulties of obtaining permission to film in a museum or church when the light was at its best – and then to coordinate the crew and all their equipment to be set up and ready to film on time. To make matters harder, as a woman she was not allowed into monastic houses. On the other hand, she found Clark easy, cooperative and professional. ‘Ann specialised in rostrum work and was a super researcher,’ Ken Macmillan recalled, but ‘she was slightly patronised by Michael. She could be difficult because she was unworldly and a little gauche but we all had huge respect and affection for her.’13

 
The BBC was the only television organisation in the world that could have attempted something as culturally and economically ambitious as this – the scale of the production was unprecedented. The research, filming and editing took three years (1966–69); the film crew of twelve travelled eighty thousand miles, visited eleven countries, used 117 locations and filmed objects in 118 museums and eighteen libraries. Two hundred thousand feet of film were shot (the length of six feature-length movies) and £500,000 was spent. As Clark told Janet: ‘Of course, it is a fearfully extravagant medium. One travels for days – five trucks of men and equipment etc for 35 seconds of film or none.’14

  The series was not made in chronological sequence – filming began not in Paris, where the opening scene is set, but in Italy. The production was accomplished in a series of campaigns, and during any one trip material for three or four programmes would be filmed – always with very tight schedules that took enormous risks with the weather. The three directors – each responsible for their own programmes – rotated, while the main crew continued filming. Typically filming would continue for six to eight weeks at a time, and during any week as many as five locations might be visited (although Florence took seven days). Only after the crew had set up and filmed scenic views (a process that might take several days) would Clark fly in to join them. Macmillan recalled, ‘I didn’t see K until the set at Carcassonne, which is episode 3, I think.’

  Clark was shaking off the lecture format, but this had one downside, as he told his publisher Jock Murray: ‘I am deeply immersed in the Civilisation programmes and think they are taking a good shape…the BBC came up with various worries: sometimes they think they are too highbrow, sometimes not highbrow enough…but whatever their merits as television, the programmes will not be printable.’15 Although he had learned a lot at ATV, his performance was still judged as too stiff by the crew: Montagnon described how he ‘would hold himself in such a way that he looked as if he had an internal problem’. Modern audiences have often been struck by Clark’s poor dentistry. Today a producer might attempt to remedy the problem, but as Montagnon admits, ‘It never occurred to us to suggest sorting out his teeth. K was encouraged to dress the way he did every day. He was so sure of himself he would have taken badly to being told how to dress.’16