In the late 1960s, the BBC began to commission a series of 13-part programs featuring “personal histories” of a variety of human endeavors. The first was Sir Kenneth Clark’s Civilization, which traced the evolution of humanity through its art and culture. Future programs, which proved extraordinarily successful in both Britain and the U.S. when they were presented on PBS, included The Shock of the New (Robert Hughes on modern and contemporary art), America (Alistair Cooke), The Age of Uncertainty (John Kenneth Galbraith on economics), and perhaps the most popular, Cosmos (Carl Sagan).

In the early 1970s, the BBC commissioned Jacob Bronowski to write and host The Ascent of Man, which traced the evolution of humanity through the history of its science. Bronowski was a polymath: professionally a mathematician and biologist, he was also an editor, critic (an expert on William Blake), chess expert and something of a raconteur. In 1939, he wrote this poem about Viennese satirist Karl Kraus:

“The Death of Karl Kraus”

Kraus died in time: before the God
he honored as his equal, who shot
Lorca, and brutally smashed
Mühsam’s delicate ears, washed
Vienna with his cleaning squads.

Now becomes God the anger which
Kraus spilled upon the dunged and rich
ferment Vienna. God also saw
the Danube spawn this medlar culture,
and plunged to drain it like a ditch.

Would Kraus to-night think it given
him as a grace, if he were driven
by boors to clean latrines? Or would
that bitter Jew pray for his God’s
forgiveness, but would not forgive?

O yes, the age which he disowned
was easy, ageing, overblown.
Kraus prayed an age sharp as day
might etch his eyes: who, had he stayed,
would see an age like night come down,

and sharp and savagely blind
the poet’s eyes, and splash his mind
bloody from a knacker’s wall.
Hate and terror walk the malls.
Below the city, torture mines

the cellars. O Mühsam, Lorca,
I call to you across the dark
age, ere my voice too is dumb.
Give courage when the headsmen come.
Give to the desecrated God
who Kraus unleashed, once more his manhood.
Give light where only ghosts, your ghosts are.

He considered The Ascent of Man, which was transmitted in 1973, just a year before his death, his crowning achievement. Covering science from the birth of mankind 400,000 years ago to contemporary advances in genetics and cloning, Bronowski’s overview introduced a general audience to the remarkable advances of mankind in understanding the world in which it pursued its aims.

It’s unfortunate that these series are rarely re-screened (though episodes of The Ascent of Man are available online here); the 13-hour format allowed for a depth of analysis unavailable to shorter forms; while The Civil War, Baseball and other Ken Burns documentaries may have emerged from them, few have joined unique personal perspectives to broad historical surveys and lack the idiosyncratic touch of these original BBC presentations. My father, who would have celebrated his 81st birthday today, was a great fan of the shows, especially The Ascent of Man. At the end of the 11th episode, “Knowledge or Certainty,” Bronowski visited Auschwitz to consider the uses to which science and administration had been put during the first half of the twentieth century, and chillingly described the tragic marriage of science and power. Its final image also recalls Howard Barker’s Found in the Ground; it is almost as if the play extended this image to a sublime and terrifying consideration of justice: