Bernice and I are currently enjoying watching Seven Worlds, One Planet – one of David Attenborough’s prestigious blockbuster series that highlights “the incredible rich and wonderful diversity of life found on our planet’s seven unique continents”. The series is certainly visually stunning, exploiting all of the technology available these days to a film crew. If much of television is ‘food porn’ and ‘real estate porn’ this is undoubtedly ‘fauna porn’.

However, I am cantankerous enough to have certain issues with the series. I’m not suggesting that, in light of the fact that Attenborough spent much of his early TV years presenting Zoo Quest,in which he traversed the globe in search of rare animals to hunt down, rip from their natural habitat and put behind bars, he should be ‘cancelled’ by environmentalists everywhere. My objections are, I hope, less totalitarian.

For starters, a series celebrating the diversity of life does itself no service by resorting to a rigid format, for all the world as if it were The Great British Bake-off or one of those makeover programmes – for clothes, cosmetics, interior design, garden design, it doesn’t really matter. We know that we are going to get, at some point, an amusing small animal going about its domestic business (courting and nest-building rituals are favourites), a large animal, sometimes basking, but always looking awesomely powerful, and a central, longer, set-piece of a lone animal or a pack hunting for prey, at first unsuccessfully, but eventually making a kill.

All of this will have often intrusive musical accompaniment, which, together with a somewhat arch commentary, will miss no opportunity to anthropomorphise and thereby, I would argue, demean the animals thus patronised. In addition, every episode will lead up to a conclusion that illustrates and bemoans the loss of natural habitat resulting from Man’s failure to steward his activity responsibly. In fairness, the series shows powerfully the inter-connectedness and delicate balance of the elements of an eco-system, and the often surprising and far-reaching effects of what may seem at first to be a trivial change. However, the message is not made more powerful by being hammered home in the exact same way in every episode.

As I watched Attenborough in his orange oilskin, with the drone-mounted camera slowly rising ever higher as it pulled back from close-up to reveal the puniness of this single human on a wide beach in front of a storm-tossed sea, my mind went back 47 years, to another man, perched this time on a hilltop, talking about the development of the human species. Let me explain how he got there.

In 1964, a third TV channel was launched in Britain, with the brilliantly inventive name of BBC2 (to distinguish it from the existing BBC channel, which was, in a similar stroke of genius, renamed BBC1). I hope you’re keeping up so far. BBC2 boasted a new technology, broadcasting not on 405 lines but on 625. This made it the obvious choice for introducing colour broadcasts, which were launched to coincide with Wimbledon 1967. The lush green of the grass, contrasting with the pastel summer shades of the spectators’ clothes and the pristine white of the players’ kit, made colour an instant success.

Another sport that looked better in colour, incidentally, was snooker, with its 8 different colours of balls against the green baize table. Of course, there was a considerable period when many viewers had not traded up to a colour set, and continued viewing in black-and-white, which led to the famous observation by an unfortunate commentator I alluded to in the title: ‘And, for those of you watching in black and white, the pink is next to the green.’ I have always felt sorry for Ted Lowe, the commentator in question, because his comment was actually helpful. In black and white, the yellow and pink balls were very similar greys, whereas the green had its own distinct shade of grey. In addition, the green was, at the time, on its spot, and therefore very easily identified. But I digress – no surprises there!

The Controller of BBC2 at the time was a young fellow called David Attenborough; he was charged with devising programmes that would show to the greatest advantage this new technology, which was, for the moment, a unique selling point for BBC2. Unsurprisingly, the first choice of programme was a series celebrating the greatest works of Western art. I suspect that this series initially virtually wrote itself. Fly the team to the great European storehouses of art (the Vatican, Amsterdam, and so on), point the camera at the ceiling (Michelangelo’s The Creation of Man), or the wall (Vermeer, Girl with a Letter), and have a figure of appropriate gravitas and eloquence stand in front of the works and present them to the viewer. Kenneth Clark, art historian, museum director and broadcaster was an obvious choice. In the event, Clark opened up the series to be more wide-reaching, and visually more interesting, even, than originally planned. The 13-part series of 50-minute programmes, Civilisation, which traced the history of Western civilisation chronologically, was an instant and huge success, and the format was well and truly established.

With the American bicentennial looming up on the horizon, and with an eye on possible American sales, BBC2’s next blockbuster was America, a look at the history of that interesting nation, fronted by Alistair Cooke, a wonderful radio broadcaster, and an established figure on both sides of the pond. Making this 13-parter bought time to think about how to realise the next project. Everyone agreed that it should be the counterpart of Civilisation, but focussing on science, rather than the arts. This presented challenges: science is less obviously visually ravishing than the arts; it is abstract and theoretical rather than concrete; it is perceived as less accessible to the man in the street; its humanity is less obvious. In short, how do you tell the story of science in 13 bite-size full-colour chunks.

Enter Jacob Bronowski, a little, bespectacled, Polish Jew, with a receding hairline and windswept eyebrows. Well, that’s one way of describing him; here’s another. Having arrived in England as a child, he won a scholarship to study maths at Cambridge. He taught maths at university, then led the field of operations research during the Second World War, increasing the effectiveness of Allied bombing. After the war he headed the projects division of UNESCO. He worked for the National Coal Board in England, before becoming a resident fellow of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego. When he wasn’t at his day job, he indulged his passions: for chess and for poetry. He was the author of several studies of the poetry of William Blake, as well as being a published poet himself. If it’s any consolation, I’m told he was a very bad cook.

And here’s another description: he was a brilliant, mesmerising, natural explicator and television broadcaster. With Bronowski at the helm, the 13-part series, with the evocative title The Ascent of Man, was screened in 1973 and immediately soared. I was absolutely hooked from the opening moments, and my wonderful wife, as my graduation gift in 1976, bought me the book of the TV series – first-hand – hardback, no less. (That was when I really knew she loved me.) We didn’t eat for a week, in order to pay for it, but it was well worth it. As I reread it now, I hear his distinctive voice, with its not-quite-native English accent, his soft but throaty r’s, his dramatic (sometimes almost flamboyant, but never less than gripping) pauses, his total grasp of narrative, of how to tell a story.

I remember the series for many, many things, but, above all, for a moment that genuinely shocked me in 1973. At the end of Episode 11, an episode entitled Knowledge and Certainty, Bronowski took us to Auschwitz, stood in front of a pool into which were flushed the ashes of countless Jews, and spoke about the Shoah. I cannot remember an earlier occasion in mainstream British culture when the Shoah was presented, and certainly not presented so starkly and so unsensationally. It is difficult now to remember a time before the Shoah was part of the general discourse: in Britain now, the Shoah has a place in the school syllabus; Valentines Park in Ilford, where I grew up, is now home to a Holocaust memorial. But 50 years ago, that was far from the case. The sequence at Auschwitz lasts less than four minutes, and I urge you to watch it here. David Attenborough, recalling the making of The Ascent of Man, described how Bronowski filmed the entire scene in one take, with no script.

That one scene gives you a taste of Bronowski’s manner, but it obviously fails to capture how the series grew, organically, to offer a coherent and cogent presentation of the development of civilisation from the perspective of science, rather than the arts. It certainly offered this layman viewer, and many, many others, some insight into the big questions of our existence, and even some possible answers.

You can find some, if not all, of the episodes of The Ascent of Man on YouTube. I have rewatched some extracts over the last couple of weeks, and, for once, I have been reassured to find that my memory has not been playing tricks on me. I did indeed live through a golden age of intelligent television, and Jacob Bronowski represents the pinnacle of that age.

And finally, our grandson may not yet hold the key to life, the universe, or even everything, but he does have the keys to the car!