Simon Schama, Mary Beard and David Olusoga front this 2018 update to Kenneth Clark’s 1969 landmark, trading a Eurocentric canon for a six-continent, 31-country survey that asks how image-making has shaped human experience across cultures. Each presenter leads three hour-long films: Schama opens with Palaeolithic cave painting and the contested ‘first masterpieces’ of Egypt and Mesopotamia; Beard confronts Classical and Islamic legacies of power and desire; Olusoga traces colonial encounters, empire-building and the afterlives of looted objects. Shooting in 4K, the production team spent three years travelling from the temples of Angkor Wat to the studios of contemporary Lagos, pairing drone photography with macro lens close-ups of pigment and gold leaf. The BBC simultaneously released Civilisations AR, a free phone app that let viewers place scanned artefacts—Benin bronzes, Assyrian reliefs, Tang tomb figures—on their living-room tables. Premiering 1 March 2018, the series drew an average 2.4 million viewers and prompted a parallel festival of 270 UK museum events, 140,000 school workshop downloads and a 10-week Open University course that enrolled 28,000 students worldwide. Press response split along predictable lines: The Guardian praised the plural ‘s’ as a long-overdue correction, The Telegraph lamented the loss of Clark’s connoisseurial certainty, and the Daily Mail devoted two pages to whether a sequence on Nigerian photography really counted as civilisation. The debate itself proved the programme’s central thesis: that who gets to define art, and whose stories survive, is always a political act.
Production Details
BBC Two / 1 Season / 9 Episodes / 2018
Showrunner(s): Denys Blakeway, Michael Jackson, Mark Bell
Writer(s): Simon Schama
Producer(s): Melanie Fall, Ian MacMillan
Main Cast
Simon Schama as self
Liev Schreiber as Narrator
Jamal J. Elias as self
Mary Beard as Presenter
David Olusoga as Presenter
