Civilisations (Season 1)

Civilisations (2018) is a BBC documentary series you can watch online on iFILM. Directed by Tim Niel, it brings three presenters — historian Simon Schama, classicist Mary Beard, and historian David Olusoga — together to map the global history of art from its earliest traces to the present day.

The starting point is Kenneth Clark's 1969 Civilisation, which spent nine episodes on Western European art and little else. This series deliberately breaks that frame: Islamic art, sub-Saharan Africa, pre-Columbian America, and East Asia get full treatment, not token gestures. Schama examines how political power has always relied on imagery to survive. Beard anchors her episodes in the ancient Mediterranean and what it still shapes today. Olusoga traces the colonial movement of objects and who gets to narrate their meaning. Dense, beautifully shot, and genuinely revisionary — the kind of television that changes how you walk through a museum. Stream Civilisations (2018) online on iFILM.