The Ascent Of Man
The most praised British documentary series of the early 70s
was The Ascent of Man, a thirteen-part scientific and
philosophical treatise by Dr Jacob Bronowski which explained how
man came to be drawn, step by step, from one field of scientific
discovery to the next.
The doctor's confident and careful words were heard as his
hunched figure bestrode the deserts or climbed the monuments and
exciting pictures unfurled. His face reflected in a bubble of
mercury was one of these. The air waves as a spear cut its
high-speed path was another.
Hours of experiments had gone into perfecting the technical
effects of course. The prop for one sequence, filmed in Holkham,
Norfolk, explaining the early methods of x-ray photography and
radar, gave the producers headaches and the locals something of a
scare. It was a large human head, made from canvas over a
chicken-wire base; and it appeared, apparently from nowhere, on
the beach one day, staring eerily out to sea.
The Ascent Of Man took four years to reach the screen
and when it did Jacob Bronowski was in hospital suffering from the
fatigue of it all. He died the following year.
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