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.)
The programme began with a brief spot of scene-setting. ‘It’s 400 AD in what will one day become Great Britain,’ intoned the narrator – and to prove it, we were shown some ants on a forest floor. It was then time for the first piece of art: ‘Spong Man’, an undeniably affecting clay carving of a bloke deep in thought.
While the Beatles were filling their boots with speed and prostitutes Mick Jagger was at the LSE
Each piece is given a different commentator and for this one Antony Gormley spoke stirringly about sculpture’s ability ‘to communicate with people who haven’t been born yet’ and of Britain’s ‘amazing unbroken history of making’. But just in case this might cause undue swelling in any watching British breasts, we were also sternly informed that ‘Spong Man’ ‘transcends nationality’, having been made by ‘European migrants that we would one day call Anglo-Saxons’.
The programme, in fact, got itself into something of a tangle on the migrant question.
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