Last month Dawn Airey, the managing director of Sky television, used her Royal Television Society Huw Wheldon lecture to deliver a stinging rebuke to one programme for its “unerringly arrogant assumptions about cultural superiority”. Her doing so was, at least, a startling tribute to the impact of the programme concerned. It was made in 1969 and was called Civilisation.

This week, we can judge how well the series has aged as it makes its debut on DVD, along with another television landmark, The Ascent of Man.

Both programmes were commissioned during British television’s “golden age”, when David Attenborough was in charge of the infant BBC Two, and the veteran broadcaster has no doubt about their value. “They are major pieces of work that ought to be available,” he says when we meet at his Richmond home. The most travelled human being in the world has just returned from Borneo and, after three decades making spectacular wildlife series, his passion and enthusiasm seem undimmed.

Ironically, Civilisation was not conceived as a cultural statement, arrogant or otherwise, but as a showcase for colour TV. “At the time, colour had an appalling reputation,” Attenborough remembers, “because in America the pictures were awful — lurid and dreadful! But I saw the new versions that our engineers had developed, which were sensational. So I thought: ‘Why don’t we get all the loveliest pictures that everybody knows and put them on show.’ And because I wanted to do it with some authority, the obvious choice for presenter was ‘K’ Clark.”

A former director of the National Gallery, Sir Kenneth Clark had also been chair of the ITC and had presented art documentaries on ITV. Attenborough invited him to lunch, implanting the idea of Civilisation in a chance remark. “He was quite keen on it,” Attenborough recalls, “but his wife was not. She thought it was vulgar. But K was a great populist, or populariser. In the end he said that he had the time of his life making the programme.”

This is a sharp reminder of the context of the time. Clark’s authoritative tone seemed dated even then, but his desire to share his knowledge was profoundly democratic. The programmes reveal a mind not merely celebrating fine art and architecture but interrogating the underlying values. After praising 19th-century humanitarianism, the last programme applauds the eager students at the new University of East Anglia as a vast intellectual improvement on the well-mannered prewar elite.

“A lot of people thought that making a 13-part series was bonkers,” says Attenborough, “but it went like wildfire. These days, when you’re not supposed to be expert about anything, it’s not to everyone’s taste, but Clark very deliberately called it ‘A Personal View’. Anyway,” he adds, “Clark is not as stiff as Simon Schama!”

Both Civilisation and The Ascent of Man seem extraordinarily slow by today’s standards, but to Attenborough this is a strength. He derides “machine- gun” delivery and ascribes the “complete restlessness” of modern documentaries to “nerves — a terror that the audience is going to get bored”.

The ambition of The Ascent of Man still awes Attenborough. Its presenter, Jacob Bronowski, proved to be a natural performer as he explained Pytha- goras or the Arab contribution to mathematics. “Now, nobody does that at all,” Attenborough laments. “Bruno thought this was a great opportunity.” He died shortly after completing the series.

Inevitably, elements in both series have been superseded by advances in scholarship or science. Even so, they stand up remarkably well, offering rich and stimulating overviews of human progress, even when they are controversial. Above all, Attenborough argues: “They left you time to think!” If only we could remember how to do it.

Civilisation and The Ascent of Man are out now on DVD

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