| The Ascent of Man | |
|---|---|
 DVD cover | |
| Genre | Documentary |
| Developed by | David Attenborough |
| Directed by | Adrian Malone,Dick Gilling,Mick Jackson,David Caird Paterson andDavid John Kennard |
| Presented by | Jacob Bronowski |
| Country of origin | United Kingdom |
| Original language | English |
| No. of episodes | 13 |
| Production | |
| Producers | Adrian Malone andDick Gilling |
| Production location | Worldwide (27 countries) |
| Running time | 593 minutes (49 minutes per episode) |
| Original release | |
| Release | 5 May 1973 (1973-05-05) – July 28, 1973 (1973-07-28) |
The Ascent of Man is a 13-part Britishdocumentary television series produced by theBBC andTime-Life Films first broadcast in 1973. It was written and presented by Polish-Britishmathematician andhistorian of scienceJacob Bronowski, who also authored a book adaptation. Intended as a series of "personal view" documentaries in the manner ofKenneth Clark's 1969 seriesCivilisation, the series received acclaim for Bronowski's highly informed but eloquently simple analysis, his long, elegant monologues, and its extensive location shoots. The programme began broadcasting onBBC2 at 9 pm on Saturday, 5 May 1973[1] and was released in the US 7 January 1975.[2] To celebrate its 50th anniversary, the documentary was again broadcast onBBC4 in the Summer of 2023.
The title alludes toThe Descent of Man (1871),Charles Darwin's second book on evolution. Over the series' 13 episodes,Jacob Bronowski travels around the world in order to trace the development of human society through its understanding ofscience. It was commissioned specifically to complementKenneth Clark'sCivilisation (1969), in which Clark argued that art reflected and was informed by the major driving forces in cultural evolution. Bronowski had written in his 1951 bookThe Commonsense of Science: "It has been one of the most destructive modern prejudices that art and science are different and somehow incompatible interests".[3] Both series were commissioned byDavid Attenborough, then controller ofBBC Two, whose colleagueAubrey Singer had been astonished by Attenborough prioritising an arts series (i.e.Civilisation) given his science background.[4]
Bronowski's book adaptation of the series,The Ascent of Man (1973), is an almost word-for-word transcript from the television episodes, diverging from the original narration only where the lack of images might make its meaning unclear. A few details of the film version were omitted from the book, notably from episode 11, "Knowledge or Certainty".
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The 13-part series was shot on16 mm film. Executive producer wasAdrian Malone; film directors were Dick Gilling,Mick Jackson, David Kennard, and David Paterson. Quotations were read by actorsRoy Dotrice andJoss Ackland. Series music was byDudley Simpson withBrian Hodgson and theBBC Radiophonic Workshop. Additional music includes work byPink Floyd andthe Moody Blues, among others. Apart from Bronowski, the only other named people appearing are the sculptorHenry Moore, and an elderlyPolish man, Stefan Borgrajewicz. In Episode 11, Borgrajewicz's face is explored in different ways as a means of testing the limits of knowledge; via different wavelengths of theelectromagnetic spectrum, a set of paintings byFeliks Topolski, and by the descriptions of a blind woman feeling his face at the beginning of the programme. Her description of his face as having "lines of possible agony" is clarified at the very end of the episode, which reveals him to have been a survivor ofAuschwitz.
The complete series wasdigitally remastered and released on DVD in 2007 by Ambrose Video Publishing, Inc.
