By way of showing us the way it used to be done, David Dimbleby began an exclusive Hay preview of his new BBC1 series with a mirthful look back at the halcyon era of plummy-voiced documentary making. "You had to stand very upright," he explained. "And you assumed people knew what you were talking about." Cue Sir John Summerson and Alec Clifton-Taylor, two wonderfully fusty old geezers - the latter the presenter of an apparently dead-on-arrival show promisingly entitled Another Six English Towns - who were once employed to explain the built environment to the great unwashed. Hats off to Reithian values and all that, but it was no fun at all.
As proved by 2005's A Picture of Britain, Dimbleby is on a mission somehow to combine informative clout with an accent on openness and accessibility, which perhaps leaves him open to barbs about middlebrow dumb-down. If you're, say, Jonathan Meades, patiently explaining cultural history with the aid of an everyman-oriented script and a lay person's enthusiasm is probably the equivalent of selling those sets of Battle Of Hastings figurines they advertise in the Mail On Sunday. There again, what ratings does he get?
Fair play to Dimbers: A Picture of Britain came close to representing modern doc-making at its best (His faux-psychedelic evocation of tripping on 18th century hallucinogens in the episode entitled The Romantic North was a treat), and his new series superficially looks almost as good. Entitled How We Built Britain, it uses architecture as a means of shining light on a narrative of power and ongoing social transformation. The beastly Normans ("People forget how much devastation they caused," Dimbleby complained) come first, succeeded by the Tudors and Stuarts, the Georgians, the Victorians, and the architectural story of the last hundred years - difficult to get a hard-and-fast take on, he explained, but in there all the same.
On this evidence, it will be television worth cancelling the odd social engagement for. That said, at the risk of second-guessing the series on the basis of DD's exposition and a large handful of clips, I have but one problem: its apparent sense of history-worship, and a depressingly damning view of where UK architecture has latterly gone.
The programme's view of the Victorians is admiring verging on the awestruck: their shared mission, Dimbleby rather speciously claimed, was to "improve the lot of everyone", a point fleshed out with reference to Mancunian sewers and Saltaire, the utopian industrial settlement built outside Bradford. The 20th and 21st centuries, by contrast, seem to be portrayed in altogether more qualified terms, where for every jaw-dropping corporate monument there is a neglected high-rise failure, and the underlying story of a country that has never quite taken modernism to heart. Dimbleby seems to think that's only right: in a sequence about Canary Wharf, he makes damning (and perhaps Freudian) reference to "arrogant buildings thrusting themselves on us." Towards the end of his hour, he described an image on Norman Foster's website of the Gherkin, overshadowing the Tower Of London. "I wonder which will last another thousand years," he said, rather witheringly.
So, we may be back in an achingly familiar place: impressive, artful, glorious, spellbinding modern buildings routinely dismissed as being somehow inhuman and brutal, whereas constructions put up in the past and no doubt condemned on the self-same grounds - from towering shire-town cathedrals to Georgian crescents - are praised to the skies. To come over all Meadesian - which hurts, I have to say - it's as middlebrow an opinion as they come.
