“things”

History BBC Radio 4’s landmark year long documentary series, A History of the World in 100 Objects utilises the collection of the British Museum to explain the development of humanity’s ingenuity from the most basic chopping tool to the solar powered lamp and charger. AudioGo have been good enough to send me a review copy of the twenty cd set, a collection so large the box has a spindle inside.

I want to savour the experience so haven’t rushed to finish all twenty-five hours before putting fingers to keyboard and also resisted the temptation to skip to the highlights like the Rosetta Stone. As ever with these blasts of knowledge (other notable examples of the format include Heather Cooper’s Cosmic Quest and James Naughtie’s The Making of Music), they’re best enjoyed in small doses, perfect for a breakfast listening alternative to Today or the fifteen minute bus ride to work.

Here’s what I’ve learned in the first ten episodes. Presenter Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum, enjoys saying the word “things”. He tends to enjoy stressing most words, but “things” in particular stands out and you could imagine a production meeting in which he pondered whether this epic could instead have been A History of the World in a Hundred ‘Things’. If ‘things’ didn’t have a myriad definitions including the derogatory it would have worked perfectly well.

I’ve also learned that humans a million and a half years ago weren’t that much different to us. Like us they were pre-occupied with survival, then with slaughtering things to eat, now with earning money to buy food that someone else has done the necessary with, but the principle is the same. They were still as concerned as most of us are won’t know where their next meal will come from, through of course, in their case it’s because their next meal has migrated or been eaten by another predator.

As David Attenborough suggests evocatively in the second episode when handing a Tanzanian chopping tool and considering how much consideration went into selecting and making the notches in the side “Did he really need to do one, two, three, four, five chips on one side and four on the other? Could he have got away with two?” those early human were also already adapting to their environment, discovering new ways to improve their quality of life.

Perhaps Attenborough would also recognise in this series a late iteration of the kinds of programmes which according to his autobiography he was involved in at the beginning of his career, at the dawn of television in which an expert from a museum would bring an object into the studio and give a long piece to camera intoning its chronology and uses. More editing involved perhaps, and more voices, but the methodology is the same.

The key difference is that MacGregor's livelier series is presented from his workplace, which is an important part of the atmospheric resonance of the series. "I'm standing on the steps of the museum" we're told as the chattering crowds gather around him. Having visited the museum and found myself jostled by tourists wanting to have their picture taken standing in front flash reflecting display cases, I wonder if, even without pictures, this series actually brings us closer to these objects than if we'd actually been standing in front of them.

Each episode doesn’t simply concentrate on the object at hand for its aesthetic qualities. They’ve been carefully selected for their metaphoric qualities, as a way of elucidating each milestone in human development. The Ain Sakhri lovers figurine in episode seven, whose indistinct form MacGregor compares favourably to similar work by the sculptors Brancusi and Rodin becomes very moving a way of explaining the development of human sexuality and the eroticism thereof.

An image of the figurine, as well as the episode and a transcript of the episode are still available on the BBC website, so what’s to gain from buying the box set? Apart from the loss of the BBC’s podcast bumpers which could prove repetitious across the episodes and .pdf images of all the objects, each week’s worth of episodes inhabit a cd and there’s a genuine sense of achievement to be had on reaching the close of each epoch, of having shifted into the period after the ice age.

But the set is also symbolically interesting within the context of the series. At one point in the not too distant past, next to the book, the cd seemed like a pinnacle of human achievement, a way of storing music in crystal clarity.  Now like the book, it's increasingly being replaced.  Plus working through this pile of discs feels like a kind of reverse audio archaeology, each new layer revealing another part of our history. Whether that adventure is worth the £34.99 recommended retail price is up to you.