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Seven Ages Of Britain

Sunday 31 January ´óÏó´«Ã½ ONE

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Written and presented by David Dimbleby, Seven Ages Of Britain tells the story of the nation through its treasures. David talks to Press Information's Tony Matthews about the making of the series.

Suspended by a harness 40 feet above the nave of Holy Trinity Church in Coventry, a nervous David Dimbleby gazed into the jaws of hell. The great treasure, of Holy Trinity which, unlike the neighbouring cathedral, escaped destruction in the Blitz of 1940, is the Coventry Doom, a nightmarish portrayal of the last judgement, in which figures such as the ale wives of Coventry tumble into eternal damnation, a terrible punishment for their crime of watering down the beer.

The Doom is among countless astonishing artefacts of immense beauty and craftsmanship that David Dimbleby examines at first hand in his new seven-part series Seven Ages Of Britain, which stretches from the Roman Emperors Claudius and Hadrian to the present day. Following his earlier series for ´óÏó´«Ã½ One, A Picture Of Britain and How We Built Britain, David this time turns his attention to the art, monuments, relics, weapons, scientific instruments and everyday items that have played their part in the formation of the nation.

David's journey takes him to Italy, Germany, Turkey, India and America to examine who the British were and are. It's a story that takes in Celtic Crosses, Arthur's Round Table in Winchester Great Hall and the Bayeux tapestry, examines the rise of the myth of England as "God's chosen nation" under the Tudors, and features artefacts such as the execution shirt worn by King Charles I. The Civil War was followed by extraordinary social change with the prosperity of the Georgian era and the emergence for the first time of a middle class of merchants and industrialists. "Then came the Empire on which 'the sun never set'," he says, "giving us the feeling that Britain was best and ruled everywhere that mattered – it became part of the British psyche."

The rise of empire is exemplified by Captain Cook's and William Penn's spirit of exploration, the self-aggrandising majesty of the Raj with the Maxim Gun as a symbol of imperial power and technological advance, the development of the parliamentary and judicial systems and then, in the chaos following two World Wars, David considers how social change and the abandonment of old traditions set people free to pursue their own interests and a "democratisation" of culture exemplified by the likes of Henry Moore, Francis Bacon and Damien Hirst. David examines their work and less-heralded items such as the Austin 7 car and wireless sets from the Twenties.

Despite the scale and scope of Seven Ages Of Britain – produced in partnership with The Open University it is one of the ´óÏó´«Ã½'s biggest ever arts commissions – David insists that it is neither a history of British art nor a social history. "I'm not a historian, and I'm not an art critic," he says. "But I have a very vivid imagination in thinking about what the world that produced these things was like. I find it a good way of getting into the past, it plays to my own instinct for understanding things through the physical."

The treasures have been chosen to embody the essential spirit of the Seven Ages.

He describes his approach quite simply as "storytelling", adding: "It's finding artefacts that excite you, explaining why they are worth looking at and what's enjoyable about them. These things are not dull illustrations of history, they are the story. They are fundamental to understanding what past generations were like, where they came from and what their thoughts were. The things we show are all particularly beautiful or entrancing, they illuminate and make a direct connection with the past."

This approach has certainly proved successful; How We Built Britain became one of the first arts programmes to reach 5 million viewers, which he finds somewhat surprising. "The invitation to do A Picture Of Britain came out of the blue and its success was even more mysterious to me," he says. "They liked the first two series and offered me a third, which is designed in much the same way with the same production team. It's not meant to be an expert's film – I think the ´óÏó´«Ã½ One audience has a great appetite for things to do with Britain, but in a very non-specialised way, something accessible, watchable and fun."

For David, much of the fun comes from being literally in touch with history. He handles most of the featured items or, as with the Doom, is able to inspect them at close quarters. In the Roman mining tunnels of Dolaucothi in West Wales, for example, he runs his fingers over the fissures where miners chipped away at the rock some 2,000 years ago: "You can go into the mines with lamps and see scorch marks where they built fires to heat the rock and then threw cold water on it to crack it and extract pure Welsh gold."

Then, on a snowy day in February 2008, he was to be found stomping through a Sussex wood declaiming Anglo-Saxon, with what is thought to be the correct pronunciation. "The poem Beowulf, a story of warriors and battles as told by a lord in his great hall, bears little relation to English as we know it today," says David. "It's not like Chaucer... it's completely wacky. I had to do it about 10 times to get it right. In the end I had to write the words in phonetic English and pin them above the top of the camera as I just couldn't remember it."

From slightly later, but offering a no less wonderful insight is Hereford Cathedral's Mappa Mundi. "Dated to around 1300, it is a large circular map of the world as seen by the early medieval mind," David says. "It has Jerusalem as the centre of the world, with England, Scotland and Ireland, all really strangely drawn, out to the left hand side. Germany is there and Rome and Florence are recognisable, along with strange monsters, serpents and men with one eye in the centre of their head like Cyclops."

Just as wondrous, if grounded in a more realistic age, the Hunterian museum in Glasgow was selected to represent the great force of the Enlightenment. "The figure we chose," David explains, "was the 18th-century anatomist William Hunter, who did the Gravid Uterus, this beautiful study of the mother and child, of the creation of the human body. Hunter used to take bodies from the morgues and dissect them to demonstrate how the human form was created. The museum has rows of casts of wombs with the child inside, bottled babies and great drawings showing the inner workings of the body... really beautiful and extraordinary."

Despite singling out these wonderful examples, David insists he has no favourite age or artefact. He says. "The selection process was rather like doing the Booker short list, it involved a lot of soul-searching over what would have to be left out. We had a story we wanted to tell and asked which objects best tell it? We gradually pared it down until each object had made its way into the programme because it was particularly vivid or told a story that other objects might not tell."

Unlike a Simon Schama or David Starkey, "historians at work who decide what they'll put in", David's approach involved close consultation with historians and museum curators. "They were extremely generous with their time. We did a lot of checking back, asking what they thought and showing them what line we were going to take, whether they thought it worked or had flaws."

During the course of 2,000 years, does a continuous theme or characteristic emerge in Britain and its people? "A capacity for pragmatism and adaptability are perhaps the strongest things you feel," David reflects. "We're quite good at avoiding revolution, at taking a common sense view about things and not getting too bothered by changes. Obviously people get very het up about things that happen, but on the whole we soldier on under the most extraordinary influences. Also, the power of being an island is important – we're not quite as susceptible to every zephyr that blows from the continent of Europe; we hold things off and decide that's not for us."

Perhaps that will change in the face of the forces of globalisation, although as David points out, Britain's relationship with Europe is a long one – Britannia, the female personification given to Britain by the Romans, has proved remarkably resilient. In the ancient city of Aphrodisias in Turkey, David examines a marble frieze depicting the earliest known image of Britannia. In the sculpture, she is shown wild and savage, about to be raped or killed by the Emperor Hadrian, a representation of Britain defeated and under the heel of Rome. Two thousand years later, David notes, a rather more proud Britannia can still be seen on our modern-day coins, a constant figure in a journey that he says offers "a glimpse into the British soul".