The birthplace of ‘Civilisation’
By making available in perpetuity programmes without too many rights issues, the online BBC archive collections are proving to be invaluable resources for researching television history. A parallel archive release from BBC Four (oddly unlisted on the main archive index page) is a treasure trove of early programmes about archaeology, most of them from the 1950s and ’60s. Many of the films in this new group star the avuncular and mustachioed Sir Mortimer Wheeler who in the 1920s and ’30s, long before he became a television pundit, was a key figure in establishing a scientific basis for archaeology. Wheeler’s post-war television tourism in the classical world appears disarmingly primitive when compared with the CGI-heavy pilgrimages of today. But it allows us to trace with striking clarity the emergence of the television form of the presenter-led journey. This would flower at the end of the 1960s in Kenneth Clark’s landmark Civilisation (1969) and more than forty years on from that series remains dominant in factual television today.
Mortimer Wheeler became a star (he was named British TV Personality of the Year in 1954) courtesy of the game show Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? (1952-59), in which experts identified objects from museum collections. Like almost all early television, this was broadcast live from a studio with three or four electronic cameras, as can be seen online from an edition shown on 28 October 1954. Wheeler is one of three panellists, while the chair is Glyn Daniel, a Cambridge don who would similarly develop a career as a television expert on the past.
Glyn Daniel is also the presenter for Buried Treasure: Stonehenge, first broadcast on 23 July 1954, in which he conducts a studio discussion with two other archaeologists. They illustrate their arguments with charmingly quaint studio models, diagrams and short, silent sequences filmed on location. This combination of techniques also suffices for another programme in the same series, Buried Treasure: Mohenjo-daro (4 June 1957) in which Wheeler, helped by substantial silent film sequences, discusses his recent excavations in the Indus Valley.
Television archaeology steps out of the studio and into the world with Hellenic Cruise, three half-hour films from the summer of 1958 in which Wheeler and some three hundred other experts and enthusiasts take a boat trip around the Aegean. (The BBC web site claims that the series is called Armchair Voyage: Hellenic Cruise but there appears to be no mention of the first two words on the films themselves.) Travel is foregrounded throughout, as we first see Sir Mortimer enjoying a substantial dinner on board a train, following which there are numerous shots on and from the ship.
The opening titles for the films acknowledge that the journey is being made by members of ‘The Hellenic Travellers’ Club’. I am far from sure that in 2013 the BBC’s compliance rules would permit such a tie-up with a commercial enterprise. The ‘Club’ was originally an organisation established in 1906 by the educational travel agent Henry Lunn (his name survives in Lunn-Poly), but by the 1950s the name and the idea behind it had been taken over by W F Swan who had once been Lunn’s private secretary. From 1954 Swan and his son Richard ran Swan Hellenic, a company which organised cruises around the Aegean. Currency restrictions were still in place and there was a shortage of decent hotels in the Aegean, and both problems were overcome by an operation which took payment in London for sleeping places on a peripatetic boat.
The potentially tricky aspect of this for the BBC is that Swan Hellenic employed Sir Mortimer to organise lectures to passengers as they made their way around the classical sites. Wheeler’s commercial interests, however, receive no acknowledgement in the films, even though he chats throughout the voyage with other learned lecturers, as here.
Weirdly to our eyes today, Sir Mortimer hardly ever seems to step off the boat, and almost all of the filming of places like Mount Olympus and Mycenae is done in generic travelogue mode accompanied only by our guide’s voice-over. The first film, for example, spends some eight minutes in Venice, but at no point do see Sir Mortimer or any other members of the ‘Club’ in a gondola, by a canal, or standing in front of St Mark’s. It is as if television had not yet learned that in order to validate the journey for us, and the substance of the narration, we need to see that our presenter actually visited these places and witnessed with his own eyes what he is talking about.
The producer of Hellenic Voyage was the remarkable Stephen Hearst, a man I knew a little at the end of the 1970s when, after a stint as Controller, Radio 3, he was BBC Television’s in-house defender of serious high art values. I argued with him on panels on several occasions – he had no interest whatsoever in arts television engaging with popular culture – but I also admired him greatly. As a Jew and a known agitator against the Nazis, Hearst had fled Austria in 1938, and he never lost the sense that the values of European culture could be submerged by barbarism. This is an idea that runs strongly through Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation, a series in the genesis of which Hearst played a key role, although for Clark the enemies at the gate are not the Nazis but the Marxist revolutionaries of the late 1960s.
The year after Stephen Hearst took the Hellenic cruise with Sir Mortimer, the producer returned with another expert, the Scottish writer Sir Compton Mackenzie, to make The Glory that was Greece (1959). Philip Purser’s delightful 2010 obituary of Hearst for the Guardian recalls what I take to be the writer’s role (as ‘wretched critic’) in unmasking that year’s ‘fakery’ scandal:
Hearst took only a silent camera to Greece. Mackenzie worked out the enthusiastic things he would say about each fabled site without appearing in shot. Back in Ealing Studios he stood in front of a back-projection screen, a wind machine teasing his silver locks, to deliver his hymn to the scene around him. ‘The glory may have been Greece’s,’ wrote the wretched critic who revealed this, ‘but the ingenuity was Ealing’s.’
Frustratingly, The Glory that was Greece is not featured in the online archive collection, perhaps because the Corporation has little interest in reminding us that the argument about what’s ‘real’ and what’s not in BBC factual programming has deep roots. The site does, however, give us the three-part follow-up, The Grandeur that was Rome (1960). In this, Hearst is reunited with Sir Mortimer, and they have finally learned to film the presenter speaking directly to camera in some corner of a foreign field. The opening shot is of a distant panorama, from which the camera pans around to reveal our man.
The rest, you might say, is the history of history on television, and of arts programmes, and of those about science and about religion and about pretty much everything else that now falls under the rubric of ‘specialist factual’. Here is where the presenter-led travel programme began. Which is why I see this as the birthplace of Civilisation – and of The Ascent of Man (1972), The Shock of the New (1980) and so much, much more.
I’ve been addicted to these- love how so many of the conclusions in these progs have been thrown out !
Thanks for this background, John. The Mortimer Wheeler programmes made a huge impact on me as a small boy. They also produced inner turmoil: would I be a footballer or an archaeologist? Neither as it’s turned out but I still feel inspired by what I saw all those years ago – the archaeological digs, I mean, rather than Brunton Park, Carlisle.
Re Henry Lunn (Poly): his son Arnold became a top skier and converted to Catholcism. He was openly fascist and a vociferous supporter of Franco and Mussolini.
When Cook learned a few years later that the videotapes of the series were to be wiped , a common practice at the time, he offered to buy the recordings from the BBC but was refused because of copyright issues. He suggested he could purchase new tapes so that the BBC would have no need to erase the originals, but this was also turned down. Of the original programmes, only eight of the twenty-two episodes still survive complete. A compilation of six half-hour programmes, The Best of What’s Left of Not Only…But Also was shown on television and has been released on both VHS and DVD.