Mary Beard opens up on presenting Civilisation and watching Kenneth Clark

But historian Mary Beard can, more or less. She was 14 in the spring of 1969, and on Sunday evenings that year she would hunker down on the sofa with her parents to watch a new TV series on a fledgling channel called BBC2.

That show was Civilisation: A Personal View by Kenneth Clark – an epic attempt to retell the history of Western culture, in colour – and it soon became established as one of the great TV events of the 1960s.

“I remember some of his words – how at the end of the first episode we survived the Dark Ages ‘by the skin of our teeth!’” recalls Mary, who this week will return the favour by presenting the second episode of BBC2’s follow-up to Clark’s opus, Civilisations.

“And I thought, blimey! Is civilisation really so perilous? I saw the show on an old black-and-white telly, not in the glorious colour it was supposed to be seen in. But it made a huge impression on me.

“I had all kinds of issues with it later. But what’s absolutely certain is that it changed the way I thought about the world. It took me to places I’d never been. It was somebody talking about the history of art and culture, which I’d never thought was possible before.”

The all-new Civilisations kicked off last week, and it certainly doesn’t lack for scope. The nine-part series – co-presented by historians Simon Schama and David Olusoga – took three years to make and was filmed across 31 countries and six continents.

This week’s episode, How Do We Look?, traces the story of the human body in ancient art, from the familiar (classical Greek statues) to the perhaps less well known – like the extraordinary Olmec heads of Mexico, a series of huge stone sculptures from a prehistoric culture that left few other clues about its origins and ideas.

“We start the second episode by raising a few puzzles,” explains Mary, who comes face to face with a 3,000-year-old Olmec giant when she visits Mexico for the opening of the show.

“The Olmec head is not a pretty piece of art in some ways. I didn’t want to take it home! “But when you look at it, you can’t get the questions out of your head: who is it? Why did they make it? Who ordered it? The more literature you have on a culture, of course, the closer you can get to some answers. But you can’t get close to all of them.”

Where literature does exist, though, it sometimes pops up in unlikely places. In Egypt’s Nile Valley, Mary tracks the tourist travels of Emperor Hadrian, who visited the ancient statue of Pharaoh Amenhotep III in November 130AD.

We know this because a fellow Roman traveller called Julia Balbilla chiselled some “graffiti” there to mark the occasion.

“I’m a very touchy, clambering-over kind of person, so it was terribly exciting to climb up one of these vast Egyptian statues and sit on its foot,” Mary explains.

“And not just any Egyptian statue, but one that had been written on by Romans, and had been a tourist attraction for thousands of years. You’re literally following in the footsteps of Hadrian, who also came here to see them 2,000 years ago. That connection through time was very exciting.”

Returning to a British-based statue that Clark admired 50 years ago, Mary goes on to examine how deeply classical art has affected the way we depict ourselves today.

Sometimes, she argues, those ideals have coloured the way Westerners view and judge other, very different civilisations.

That’s something they have tried to address in the new series. “We’re in dialogue with Clark, but we’re doing something that we think is for us,” she explains.

Fifty years on, in fact, she has a few issues with the way that original series tackled the whole idea of civilisation.

“Playing the woman card a bit, it was a ‘Great Man’ theory of art and culture. Women got the occasional look-in – but very occasional. And I think that was slightly old fashioned even in 1969.

“So I think there are different perspectives one wants to include now. That’s part of what the ‘s’ signals at the end of our Civilisations. You can’t think about it in the singular any longer.”

Was she at all daunted by the idea of tackling one of the crown jewels of TV history, though? “Terribly!” she laughs.

“It was a mixture of feeling completely daunted, excited, and also thinking it was an opportunity I’d be mad to turn down.”

That said, Mary thinks Clark – who passed away in 1983 – would like what they’ve done.

“He always said his programme was ‘a personal view’, and I think he’d be very pleased that other people have their personal views too.

“Although there are challenges to his position and to what he counted as being important, we’re still talking about the same things. So I think he’d want to join in the conversation, really.”