Jacob Bronowski’s personal account of the ascent of man is being shown again on UKTV Documentaries on Saturdays. I remember this series when it first appeared in 1973; an extraordinary essay on the foundations of our civilization. I am now working on a series about the science and technology of the Ancient Greeks, Egyptians, Chinese, and so on; I am learning a certain amount about them, and am therefore particularly interested to see how Bronowski tackled the same subjects.

The first thing I notice is the difference in style. The programme about Pythagoras – one of my great heroes and the man who invented mathematical proof – begins with a minute and a half of pretty shots and music. No voice-over, just mood. No producer would be allowed to do that today. The twenty-first century viewer is supposed to have an attention span of about ten seconds, and therefore something ‘exciting’ has to happen before ten seconds have elapsed.

Then Bronowski simply talks to camera, occasionally moving about a bit, or doing a simple demonstration. There are no ‘experts’, no American scientists sitting beside their computers, no one dressed up in funny clothes, and above all no flashy visual effects – slowmo, fastmo, crash zooms, or tilted cameras. Only slow pans across the Greek landscape to find Bronowski under an olive tree, waiting to tell us something complicated and interesting, in his calm measured tones.

He also uses the surroundings as his props – demonstrating Pythagoras’s Theorem with a few tiles and a twig torn from the olive tree. In another programme, about the Arabs, he describes with the help of beautiful decorative tiling the connections between art and mathematics and Islam.

I remember The Ascent of Man as compulsive viewing, and I am delighted to find I still enjoy the series today, although Bronowski’s deliberate delivery sometimes makes me want to speed the tape up a bit. Also because he goes slowly, he leaves out many bits of the story that I long to put back in. In other words because in the 30 years since I last saw it I have learned a good deal about the subject, I still find his take on it fascinating, but I wish he could have fleshed it out a little more.

If you did not see it in 1973, I urge you to watch at least one episode now.