Art That Made Us is an ambitious new series, firmly in the ‘history of something in a load of different objects’ category. That the something in question is Britain duly means that we get the BBC’s usual, and perhaps even very British, mix of deep patriotism on the one hand and deep suspicion of patriotism on the other.
The opening episode tackled the era formerly known as the Dark Ages, which the narrator felt duty-bound to remind us yet again was actually a period of great creativity and innovation. (Not that you could blame him. The darkness of the Dark Ages seems to be one of those myths that no amount of facts can ever destroy – along with, say, the Rolling Stones being the bad boys of 1960s pop, even though the Beatles were filling their boots with speed and Hamburg prostitutes while Mick Jagger was studying accountancy at the LSE.
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